Incident Management

Incident Management is the internal workflow for coordinating your team's response to unplanned disruptions — separate from what your subscribers see.

Incident Management gives your team a structured way to handle disruptions: assign who's responsible, track severity, and follow step-by-step runbooks — all while keeping your status page updated for subscribers.

Incident Management is not the same as a status page incident notice. A notice is the public post your subscribers see on the status page. An incident is the internal record for your team's response. They work together — updates posted on an incident also appear on the linked notice — but they serve different audiences.

Declaring an incident

Go to Incident Management → Incidents and click Declare incident. Each incident captures:

• Title and description — what happened and any initial context

• Status — where the response stands: Investigating → Identified → Monitoring → Resolved

• Affected service and status — which service is impacted and how severely (Operational, Degraded, or Unavailable)

• Severity — Sev1 through Sev5 to communicate urgency across the team

• Commander — the person leading the response

• Responders — team members helping to resolve it

Incidents can also be declared directly from Slack using the /spal new command, without leaving your Slack workspace.

Slack integration

When your organization has connected a Slack workspace, StatusPal Next can automatically create a dedicated channel per incident and invite the commander and all responders. This happens when the incident matches a runbook that has a Slack step configured — the channel is created as part of executing that runbook step.

A Slack channel is only created automatically if your organization has Slack connected and the incident matches a runbook with a Slack step. Incidents without a matching Slack-step runbook do not get a dedicated channel.

Runbooks

Runbooks are reusable, step-by-step response plans you define in advance. When an incident is declared, any runbook matching the incident's service and severity is automatically triggered — team members check off steps as they work through the response, providing structure during high-pressure situations and a clear audit trail after. Runbook steps can include Slack actions (creating the incident channel), manual tasks, and more.

Roles

Only admins can resolve or delete an incident. Members can declare incidents, post updates, and complete runbook steps.