What is an incident?

Incidents happen no matter how well companies try to avoid them. Minimizing the downtime of IT infrastructures and web sites can be critical to the survival of organizations, because time is the greatest enemy during the course of an Incident. Opsgenie’s incident management features help organizations quickly and effectively identify problems, notify the right people, facilitate communications across business units, and collaborate to resolve problems. Opsgenie helps preventing incidents from becoming the kinds of disasters that fill the news and social media.

Watch Incident response with Atlassian’s Opsgenie on Youtube

Incidents are special types of Opsgenie Alerts indicative of a high-priority service interruption. Incidents notify the people who need to know what is happening; they also help organizations automate, manage, and track information and communications related to outages and similar problems that can impact infrastructure.

About incidents

Responders generally begin viewing and working with Incidents in Opsgenie on the Alerts Dashboard, where they can view, create, and take actions on Incidents. If an organization integrates Chat tools with Opsgenie, users can do the same things through chat channels. Stakeholders and Observers cannot access Alerts and Incidents, although Stakeholders have access to some of this information on the Services List.

Incidents may be composed of more than one Alert. Priorities and messages may differ, depending on how the Incident was created:

Automated Incidents
If Incident creation is automated (by consolidating Alerts through the use of Incident Rules), then the Incident Message, Stakeholder Message, and Stakeholder Description values come from Alert data. For example, {{message}}, {{priority}}, and other properties and field values come from Alert data that match the settings in the Service’s Incident Rules.

Custom Incidents and Incident Templates
If a Custom Incident is created manually, manually enter the Incident Message and other properties while the Incident is created —  or by selecting an Incident Template in which Priority, Messages, and other properties have already been designated.

Associating Alerts to Create or Update Incidents
When Alerts are combined to create an Incident or when Alerts are added to an Incident, the Incident may contain conflicting choices related to Priority and Message. In this context, OpsGenie resolves conflicts, as follows:

• An Incident’s Priority can be optionally inherited from the Alert with the highest Priority if opted-in in the template creation or during manual incident creation.

• The event message underlying an Incident becomes the Incident Message, by default, although it is an option to update the Incident Message manually.

More incident features and functions:

• Services

• Incidents

• Automating Communications and Collaboration

• Users and User Roles

• Post Incident Analysis Report

• View Service API documentation