Incidents
An incident is Moonitor's record of a period of downtime for a monitor — when it started, what caused it, and once it's resolved, when it ended and how long it lasted.
What is an incident?
An incident is Moonitor’s record of a period of downtime for a single monitor. It captures when the problem started and the cause — the failure reason reported by the check that failed. Once the monitor recovers, the incident also records when it ended and how long it lasted.
Incidents give you a clean timeline of every outage, so you’re never guessing about what happened or for how long. Each one is tied to the monitor it belongs to.
The incident lifecycle
Every incident moves through the same three stages:
- 1
A check fails — the incident opens
When a check fails, Moonitor opens an incident, records the start time and the cause, and moves the monitor into the Down state.
- 2
The monitor stays down — the incident stays open
For as long as the monitor keeps failing, the incident remains open and continues to track the ongoing outage.
- 3
The monitor recovers — the incident resolves
The next successful check — or, for heartbeat monitors, the next ping — resolves the incident. Moonitor records the end time and calculates the total duration.
Incidents and notifications
Incidents are what drive your alerts. When an incident opens, Moonitor sends a “down” alert to the monitor’s contacts on the first failed check. When the incident resolves, a “recovery” (up) alert goes out — but only to the contacts that were actually notified about the down, so you always get the matching all-clear and never a recovery for an alert you never received.
Tip
Want fewer alerts from a flaky service? Each separate outage opens its own incident and alert, so a service that flips up and down repeatedly is noisy by nature. Lengthen its check interval so brief blips between checks pass unnoticed, or pause the monitor during known-flaky windows. Incidents are still recorded either way.
Acknowledging an incident
You can acknowledge an open incident to signal to your team that someone is looking into it — useful for avoiding duplicate effort when several people get the same alert.
Note
Acknowledging does not resolve the incident. The monitor still needs to recover before the incident closes and the duration is recorded.
Where to see incidents
Incidents show up across the dashboard so you can spot and review them quickly:
| Location | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Overview | Highlights any currently active incidents at a glance. |
| Incidents page | A list of incidents across your monitors. |
| Monitor detail page | That monitor's incident timeline alongside its response-time history. |
History and status pages
Resolved incidents stay in your history, so you can look back over past outages and their durations whenever you need to review reliability or report on it.
Incidents can also be reflected publicly on your status pages so your users know what’s happening without having to ask.