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Incident Reference

An incident in OpenStatus represents a detected problem or service disruption related to a monitored resource. Incidents are automatically generated when a monitor reports a failure condition that meets predefined criteria. They serve as a central point for tracking, managing, and resolving service impairments.

Key characteristics:

  • Automatically triggered by monitor failures.
  • Aggregates related failure events for a single monitor.
  • Provides a clear status of service health.

An incident is triggered when a significant percentage of recent monitoring checks for a given monitor report a failed status. This mechanism prevents false positives from transient network issues.

Trigger Condition:

  • Failure Threshold: An incident is initiated when at least 50% of the checks within a defined window (e.g., the last N checks or within a T duration) have reported a failure or degraded status.

Incidents progress through several states reflecting their current resolution status. These states are managed through status reports (see Status Report Reference).

Primary States:

  • investigating: The incident has been detected, and the team is actively looking into the root cause.
  • identified: The root cause of the incident has been identified.
  • monitoring: A fix has been deployed or a mitigation is in place, and the service is being monitored to confirm resolution.
  • resolved: The incident has been fully resolved, and the service is operating normally.

While an incident is active, it collects and displays key information related to the service disruption.

  • Monitor Association: Each incident is directly linked to the monitor that triggered it, providing immediate context to the affected service.
  • Start Time: Timestamp indicating when the incident was first detected and created.
  • Status Reports: A chronological log of all updates and state changes applied to the incident.
  • Impacted Locations: Details on the geographical regions from which the monitor reported failures.