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Status pages

Status page incidents

A status page incident tells your customers about a problem, in your words. It has a title, a status, public updates and an impact on each affected component. The impacts set the status of the components and the uptime bars. Your team's own incidents stay internal until you publish to a status page.

Statuses and impacts

Each update gives the incident a status. The incident has the status of its newest update.

Each affected component gets an impact: Degraded (degraded_performance), Partial outage (partial_outage) or Full outage (major_outage). Not affected means no impact. If the page has no components, the incident has one Impact of its own, and the headline of the page follows it.

Publish an incident

Owners, managers and admins can publish incidents.

1. In the dashboard, open the status page and go to the Incidents tab.
2. Select New public incident.
3. Type a Title, for example Elevated API error rates.
4. Select the status.
5. Under Affected components, select an impact for each affected component.
6. Type the Initial update. You can use Markdown.
7. Optional: set Happened at to a time in the past. The default is now.
8. Optional: clear Notify subscribers by email to publish without an email.
9. Select Publish incident.

The incident shows on the public page at once. Each affected component gets its impact from the Happened at time. The headline follows the worst impact.

Post an update

1. Open the incident on the Incidents tab.
2. In Post update, select the new status.
3. Change the impact of each component, if the impact changed.
4. Type the Update.
5. Optional: set Happened at and clear Notify subscribers by email.
6. Select Post update.

An update states the impact of each component as of its Happened at time. A changed impact starts at that time. A component that you set to Not affected stops being affected at that time.

If you select Resolved, Spectate ends every ongoing impact at the time of the update. The affected components go back to operational, unless another incident or a maintenance still affects them.

Edit and delete updates

The Public timeline on the incident lists all updates, newest first. Point at an update to edit or delete it.

• Edit changes the Status, Happened at time and Message of the update. If you move Happened at, the impact changes of that update move with it.
• Delete removes the update. The impact periods stay.

Edits and deletes are silent. Spectate does not email subscribers again.

To change the title, use Incident details and select Save incident. These edits are also silent.

Edit the impact timeline

The Impact timeline shows one row per component, with a bar for each period of impact. Use it to correct the history, for example if the outage started at 09:12 and you posted at 09:40.

• Select a bar to change the Component, the impact, Started or Ended, or to delete the period.
• Select Add period to add a period. Select Ongoing for a period that has not ended.

Periods of one component in one incident cannot overlap. Ended must be after Started. Both times can be at most one minute in the future. A resolved incident needs an end time on every period.

Spectate calculates the component status and uptime again after each edit. Timeline edits never email subscribers.

Publish from a team incident

You can publish to a status page from a team incident. The public incident is linked to the team incident.

1. Open the incident under Incidents in the dashboard.
2. In the Status pages panel, select Publish.
3. Select the Status page.
4. Select the Public status and the impact of each component.
5. Type the Subscriber-facing update.
6. Optional: set Happened at and clear Notify subscribers by email.
7. Select Publish update.

The first publication creates the public incident, with the title of the team incident. Later publications to the same page add updates to that public incident. Your role must allow you to change both the incident and the status page.

You can also publish from Slack with /spectate status-page, or ask an AI assistant through the MCP server.

Automatic incidents

Monitors that are linked to components can open and resolve public incidents. Turn this on in Settings → Automation. An automatic incident has the label Automatic in the dashboard. If you post an update or edit its impact timeline, you take it over and automation stops changing it. See automatic incidents from monitors.

Write a public write-up

A write-up explains to visitors what happened, why, and what you change. It is separate from the internal postmortem. Spectate never publishes the postmortem.

1. Open the incident on the Incidents tab.
2. In Public write-up, type the text in Markdown. Or select Start from postmortem to copy the postmortem of the linked team incident into the editor.
3. Select Published on the status page.
4. Optional: select Email subscribers the write-up.
5. Select Publish write-up.

A published write-up shows above the updates on the public incident page. Without Published on the status page, the write-up is a draft that only your team sees. Select Save draft to keep it.

Spectate emails the write-up only once, when you first publish it. Later edits never send an email. Unpublish removes the write-up from the public page.

Delete an incident

Deleting removes the incident, its updates and its impact periods from the public page and from the uptime history. Spectate does not email subscribers. Resolving keeps the public history, so it is usually the better choice.

1. Open the incident and go to Incident details.
2. Select Delete incident.
3. Confirm with Delete incident.

When Spectate emails subscribers

Spectate emails confirmed subscribers in these cases, unless you clear Notify subscribers by email:

Edits of details, updates and the impact timeline never send an email. Deleting never sends an email.

Related

• Components and their status
• Subscribers
• Status page incidents in the API reference