Incident timeline and comments

Follow the incident timeline in ilert, add comments to keep your team aligned, and communicate publicly with status updates.

The incident timeline is the running record of everything that happened during an incident. It is internal to your response team and is the foundation for a post-mortem once the incident is over.

The incident timeline

The timeline is an append-only log shown in the incident view. ilert records key events automatically, including:

• the incident being declared,

• changes to severity and status,

• responders joining the incident,

• alerts being linked or unlinked,

• status updates being posted,

• an incident channel being attached.

Entries appear in chronological order, so anyone joining the incident can catch up quickly.

Comments

Comments are notes you write onto the timeline yourself. Use them to capture anything that helps coordinate the response or prepare the post-mortem:

• investigation findings ("Connection pool exhausted on db-primary-1"),

• decisions and their reasoning ("Rolling back instead of hotfixing because…"),

• handoff context when responsibility moves between people or regions.

To add a comment, type into the Add comment to timeline field in the incident view and send it. Comments are interleaved with automatic entries in chronological order.

If the incident has an incident channel, comments are kept in sync with that channel so the conversation and the timeline stay together.

Communicating publicly with status updates

The incident timeline is internal. To communicate with customers, post a status update from the incident by clicking Post status update.

A status update is a separate, public-facing message published to your status pages. Posting one is always a deliberate action—the incident's internal title, summary, severity, and timeline are never exposed. When you post a status update, the timeline records that it happened, but the public wording lives only on the status update itself.

See Status updates for the full walkthrough of posting and resolving them.