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This guide walks you through creating an incident in the dashboard, paging the on-call responder, and moving it through its lifecycle to resolution.
Driving incidents from a script or pipeline instead? See the Incidents API guide.
1

Open the create form

Go to Incidents in the dashboard (/incidents) and click Create Incident in the top right. This opens the new-incident form at /incidents/new.
2

Fill in the incident details

Complete the form:
Choosing an On-call lead schedule is how paging starts from the dashboard — the current responder on that schedule is paged and becomes the incident lead. If you leave it blank, the incident is created without paging anyone; you can assign a lead later from the incident page.
Use the severity levels consistently across your team:
3

Create the incident

Click Create Incident. scaling.cloud opens the new incident’s detail page. Every incident starts in investigating status. If you selected an on-call lead, the responder is paged right away — see Acknowledge and hand off for what they do next.
4

Move the incident through its lifecycle

On the incident detail page, use the Post update card to record progress. Each update is internal by default; tick the Also transition to … checkbox — it names the next status in the sequence — to advance the incident as you post.Status moves one way through the sequence:investigatingidentifiedmonitoringresolvedPost an update and transition to identified once you’ve found the root cause, then to monitoring when a fix is deployed and you’re watching for confirmation.
To publish a customer-visible message on your status page as you go, switch the update’s visibility to public before posting. See Publish a Status Page.
5

Resolve the incident

When the incident is fully mitigated and confirmed stable, post a final update and tick Also transition to resolved. When you transition to resolved, the body of that update becomes the resolution note on the timeline.
Resolved is terminal. Once an incident is resolved, no further status changes or updates can be posted on it. If you want a post-incident write-up to appear on your status page, publish it as a public update before resolving.

Next steps

Acknowledge and hand off

What the paged responder does when the alert comes in.

Configure Escalation

Set up the chain of responders an incident pages.