# Getting started ilert's incident comms product is a suite of capabilities to effectively communicate incidents to stakeholders and external users. ## What is incident communication? Incident communication is the process of informing users that a service is experiencing issues in a way that will likely impact the user experience. ## Why use ilert's incident comms features? * Spend less time on manual incident communication and focus on resolving incidents. * Build trust with your customers by keeping your users in the loop during an incident * Reduce incoming support requests during incidents ## The basics * [**Incidents**](https://docs.ilert.com/incidents-and-status-pages/incidents) are the main way to communicate with your users when you are experiencing user impacting issues with the services you provide to them. * [**Services**](https://docs.ilert.com/incidents-and-status-pages/services) model business capabilities to which subscribers can subscribe to receive updates about incidents. Any user in ilert can subscribe to incidents, services and status pages. * [**Status pages**](https://docs.ilert.com/incidents-and-status-pages/status-pages) are one way to help you inform users about outages and maintenances of one or more service. * [**Metrics**](https://docs.ilert.com/incidents-and-status-pages/metrics): Use metrics in status pages to showcase how well your services are performing. You can submit your own metrics data or import metrics from your existing tools (e.g. Datadog). --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.ilert.com/incidents-and-status-pages/getting-started.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.