Incidents

In Cachet, an incident represents any ongoing issue or event that affects the service. You can manage incidents via the dashboard. Incidents consist of:

• Name: A brief description of the incident.
• Status: The current status of the incident.
• Message: A detailed description of the incident.
• Occurred At: The time the incident occurred. This can be left empty if the incident happened at the time of reporting.
• Published At: An optional time to publish the incident. While set in the future, the incident is hidden from the status page and public API until that moment. Leave it empty to publish immediately.
• Visibility: Whether the incident should be visible to users, guests or always be hidden.

The Cachet dashboard provides a simple interface to manage incidents. You can quickly record a new incident by clicking the “New Incident” link in the top navigation bar. You can also view and manage existing incidents by clicking the “Incidents” link in the sidebar.

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Incident statuses

Incidents and updates in Cachet can have one of the following statuses:

• Reported: The incident has been reported.
• Investigating: The incident is actively being investigated.
• Identified: The cause of the incident has been identified.
• Watching: The incident or the resolution is being watched.
• Fixed: The incident is fully resolved.

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Scheduling publication

Incidents don’t have to go live the moment you create them. By setting a Published At date in the future, you can prepare an incident ahead of time and have it appear automatically when that time arrives. Until the published date passes, the incident is treated as a draft:

• It is hidden from the status page and from public reads of the API — for guests and read-only API tokens alike.
• It remains fully visible and editable in the dashboard, over the MCP server, and to API tokens with the incidents.manage ability, so you can review and adjust what you’ve prepared.
• Any subscriber notifications are deferred — they are sent when the incident is published, not when it is created.

Leave Published At empty (the default) to publish the incident immediately, preserving the usual behaviour.

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Incident components

Incidents don’t typically occur in isolation. They often affect one or more components of the service. Cachet allows you to link incidents to components to provide more context about the incident. Once you’ve created an incident, you can link it to a component by editing the incident and clicking “Attach” in the “Components” panel on the incident page. When attaching a component, you may also select what status to update the component to.

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Incident updates

Typically, incidents are ongoing events that require updates to keep users informed. You can add updates to an incident to provide more information. Incident updates consist of:

• Message: A detailed description of the update.
• Status: The status of the incident after the update.

To update an incident, head to the “Incidents” panel in the dashboard and click “Record Update” on the incident you want to update.

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Incident templates

Cachet allows you to build incident templates so you can create incidents quickly. Cachet supports creating incident templates with two templating languages: Incident templates are particularly powerful when combined with the API as they allow you to create a new incident by passing a template and variables. Cachet creates the incident from the template, filled in with the variables you provide.