Incident templates

Saved wording you can apply when posting a status update, declaring an incident, or scheduling a maintenance window.

A template holds a title, a body, and some defaults, so nobody has to write "we are investigating elevated error rates" from scratch at three in the morning. Applying one fills the fields in; you can still change anything before you publish.

Despite the name, a template is not only for status updates. One template can serve three places at once.

Create a template

Go to Incident templates in the sidebar and click Create new template.

Applies to decides the rest of the form: fields that none of the ticked surfaces reads are hidden.

Field	What it does
Teams	Who manages the template
Name	Required, and internal — never shown to anyone reading a status page
Applies to	Where the template can be picked: Status update, Incident, Maintenance window. All three by default
Title	The headline. Used on every surface. Accepts alert placeholders
Summary	The body. Used on every surface. Accepts Markdown and alert placeholders
Severity	A default severity, applied when declaring an incident. Optional
Status	A default public status, applied when posting a status update. An incident always opens at Declared regardless
Send notifications	Whether Notify subscribers starts on, when the template is used to post a status update. Maintenance windows keep their own notification schedule

The form hides what the ticked surfaces do not use, so a template marked for maintenance windows only will not ask you for a severity.

Use one

• Posting a status update — open the Templates control in the Post status update dialog.
• Declaring an incident — open Templates in the Declare incident dialog. Note that a template never ticks Create incident channel, even at SEV1.
• Scheduling a maintenance window — pick it on the maintenance window form.
• Automatically, from an alert source — the Update status page alert action posts a status update from a template with no human involved. See Services: automation with alert sources.

Alert placeholders

A template used by an alert source has no author to fill in the specifics, so it substitutes them from the alert. Write a placeholder in double braces — {{serviceName}} is degraded — and it is replaced when the update is created.

Placeholders only resolve for updates created from an alert. Applied by hand, they stay as literal text, which is worth remembering before you publish one to customers.

Placeholder	Resolves to
serviceId	The id of the affected service
serviceName	The name of the affected service
serviceDescription	The description of the affected service
serviceStatus	The new status of the service
serviceStatusOld	The status the service is moving from
teamNames	A comma-separated list of team names, resolved by walking the ownerships of the affected service and of the alert source
alertId	The id of the alert that triggered the update
alertSummary	Its summary
alertDetails	Its details
alertStatus	Its status
alertPriority	Its priority
alertSourceId	The id of its alert source
alertSourceName	The name of its alert source
escalationPolicyId	The id of its escalation policy
escalationPolicyName	The name of its escalation policy