# Issue reports and traffic alerts

Your customers often notice a problem before your monitors do. With issue reports, visitors of a [status page](/status-pages/introduction) can tell your team that something does not work. When enough visitors report within a short time, Spectate fires an [alert](/alerting/alerts). A second alert fires when the page gets much more traffic than usual.

## Turn on issue reports

Issue reports are off by default. Owners, managers and admins can turn them on.

1. In the dashboard, open the status page and go to **Settings → Visitor reports**.
2. Select **Let visitors report problems**.
3. Set the **Threshold**: the number of reports, 1 to 1000. The default is 5.
4. Set **Within**: the time window in minutes, 1 to 1440. The default is 10.
5. Optional: select **Tell visitors when others report problems too**.
6. Select **Save visitor reports**.

## What visitors send

With issue reports on, the public page shows a **Report a problem** link above the components and in the footer. The dialog has three fields, and all are optional:

- **Affected components**: the components that do not work for the visitor.
- **What's wrong?**: a message of up to 1000 characters.
- **Email**: an address, only if the visitor wants a reply.

The visitor selects **Send report**. The dialog has no captcha. Spectate drops reports from bots with a hidden field and a minimum time of 2 seconds to fill in the form.

## Limits per visitor

| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Reports that count, per visitor IP address and page | 1 per time window |
| Reports per visitor IP address, all pages | 10 per hour |
| Reports per page | 500 per time window |

Because each visitor counts once per window, the threshold is the number of different visitors. A visitor who sends a second report in the same window sees "You already reported a problem a few minutes ago".

## When many visitors report

When the number of reports in the time window reaches the threshold, the page is **Above threshold**. Spectate then does these things:

- It fires the alert "Visitors are reporting problems on `<page>`" with severity high. Turn this off in **Settings → Alerting** with **Visitors report problems**.
- If you selected **Tell visitors when others report problems too**, the page shows "Users are reporting issues" under **Happening now**. The notice says that nothing has been confirmed yet. It does not show while an incident is open.

Issue reports never change the status of a component or the headline. Only [incidents](/status-pages/incidents) and [maintenance](/status-pages/maintenance) do that.

Spectate checks every minute. After a full time window without a new report, Spectate removes the notice and resolves the alert. If you turn off issue reports or their alert, Spectate also resolves a firing alert.

## Where the alerts go

Alerts from a status page go to the escalation paths that you select in **Settings → Alerting**. Without a selection, they go to the team default [escalation path](/alerting/escalation-paths). Status pages are not part of a project.

## Read the reports

The **Reports** tab of the status page lists all reports, newest first. The table shows when each report came in (**Reported**), **What's wrong**, the **Components** and **Reply to**. The top of the tab shows whether the page is above the threshold right now.

Select **Delete** on a report to remove it, for example to remove an email address.

Only owners, managers and admins see the email addresses of reporters. Members see **Hidden**.

## Privacy

Spectate stores the components, the message, the email address and the time of each report. It does not store the IP address or the browser of the visitor. Spectate uses a hash of the IP address only for the rate limits.

## Traffic spike alerts

A sudden rise in page views is often the first sign that customers notice a problem. Spectate counts the views of each status page and compares the last 15 minutes with the usual traffic at that time of day.

Spectate fires the alert "Traffic to `<page>` is `<n>`× normal" with severity medium when both of these are true:

- The views of the last 15 minutes are at least the **Multiplier** times the usual views. The usual views are the median of the same 15 minutes on each of the last 28 days, and at least 3.
- The views of the last 15 minutes are at least the **Minimum views**.

| Setting | Default | Range |
|---|---|---|
| **Multiplier** | 5 | 2 to 100 |
| **Minimum views** | 25 per 15 minutes | 10 or more |

Spectate checks every 5 minutes. The alert resolves when the views drop below three quarters of the threshold. Pages younger than 7 days never fire this alert.

Traffic spike alerts are on for new pages. Change them in **Settings → Alerting** under **Traffic spikes**.

Spectate counts one view per visitor IP address per page per 10 minutes. It does not count bots, automatic refreshes, feeds or share images. It stores only the number of views per minute, without IP addresses, browsers or referrers. The **Overview** tab shows the views per hour of the last 7 days, with the usual views as a dashed line.

## Related

- [Alerts](/alerting/alerts)
- [Status page issue reports in the API reference](/api-reference/status-page-issue-reports)