Status updates
Post status updates in ilert to communicate the state of an incident to your users and stakeholders on your status pages.
What is a status update?
A status update is a public-facing message that communicates the state of an incident to your users. Status updates are how you keep customers and stakeholders informed when a service they rely on is degraded or unavailable.
A status update has one or more affected services and will be:
posted on all status pages that contain at least one of the affected services,
communicated to all subscribers of either the status page or an affected service,
and additionally sent to subscribers that were manually added to the incident.
Status updates were previously called "incidents"
What ilert previously called an "incident" is now a status update. The name Incident now refers to the incident coordination record used to organize your response. A status update is the public communication you post about an incident.
Alerts, incidents, and status updates
ilert separates the technical signal, the internal coordination, and the public communication into three distinct entities:
Alert
Monitoring tools (automatically)
On-call responders
A technical signal that pages the right people.
Incident
Declared manually or from an alert
Your response team (internal)
The coordination record that organizes the response.
Status update
Posted from an incident
Customers & stakeholders (public)
The public message shown on your status pages.
Post a status update
Status updates are posted from an incident. This keeps your internal coordination and your public communication connected: the incident holds the full internal context, while each status update is a deliberate, customer-friendly message.
To post a status update, open an incident and click Post status update.
A status update has the following fields:
Public title
The customer-facing title shown on your status pages. It is set on the first update and shared across all pages the incident appears on.
Status
The public status of the incident: Investigating, Identified, Monitoring, or Resolved.
Message
The public-facing text of the update. You can draft it with ilert AI.
Affected services
The services impacted by the update, each with an impact level. The impact level determines the public status shown on your status pages.
Notify subscribers
Whether to notify subscribers of the affected services and status pages about this update.
When you publish the update, ilert posts it to every status page that includes at least one of the affected services and—if enabled—notifies subscribers.
The public status of a service on a status page changes only when a status update is posted. Declaring an incident or changing its affected services updates ilert internally, but nothing is shown publicly until you post a status update.
Resolving an incident publicly
When the incident is over, post a status update with the status Resolved. The affected services return to Operational on every status page the update is published to, and subscribers are notified that the issue has been resolved.
Incident templates
Create incident templates to:
use as a starting point when posting status updates, and
automatically create status updates using alert source automation rules.
When you post a status update, you can select one of your templates and all fields will be pre-filled using the values from the template.
Create an incident template
Go to Incident comms or Status pages (depending on your pricing plan) and click on the Incident templates tab.
Click on Create new template.
Give the template a name and fill out the fields that you would like to have pre-filled.
Click Create template.
Using alert placeholders in incident templates
When a status update is created from an alert (using alert source automation rules), placeholder variables are substituted with their corresponding values. To use a variable in your template, include it in double braces, like this: New status update for service {{serviceName}}.
The following variables are available for substitution:
serviceId
The id of the service that is affected
serviceName
The name of the service that is affected
serviceDescription
The description of the service that is affected
serviceStatus
The new status of the service that is affected
serviceStatusOld
The old/current status of the service that is affected
teamNames
A comma separated list of team names. This corresponds to the same value that is shown in the teams field of an incident and is resolved by traversing the ownerships of the affected service and the alert source that created the alert.
alertId
The id of the alert that triggered this status update
alertDetails
The details of the alert that triggered this status update
alertSummary
The summary of the alert that triggered this status update
alertStatus
The status of the alert that triggered this status update
alertPriority
The priority of the alert that triggered this status update
alertSourceId
The id of the alert source of the alert that triggered this status update
alertSourceName
The name of the alert source of the alert that triggered this status update
escalationPolicyId
The id of the escalation policy of the alert that triggered this status update
escalationPolicyName
The name of the escalation policy of the alert that triggered this status update
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