What Is an Incident?

What Is an Incident?

An incident is PulseAPI's record of a problem with one of your monitors. This article explains what triggers an incident, what information it contains, and how it relates to alert rules.

What Creates an Incident

Incidents are created automatically — you don't create them manually. Here's what has to happen:

  1. PulseAPI runs a check on a monitor.
  2. The check fails (wrong status code, timeout, connection error, SSL issue, etc.).
  3. The check result is evaluated against your active alert rules.
  4. An alert rule's condition is met (e.g., status code is not 200, response time exceeds 2000ms).
  5. PulseAPI creates an incident and sends a notification to the channels assigned to that rule.

Important: A failed check does not automatically create an incident. An incident is only created if the failure matches an active alert rule. If you're not seeing incidents for failures, check that you have an alert rule configured and active.

What an Incident Contains

Every incident record includes:

Field Description
Title Auto-generated description of what failed and how
Status Current lifecycle state: open, acknowledged, or resolved
Severity Critical, High, Medium, or Low — determined by the alert rule
Affected monitor Which endpoint triggered the incident
Started at When the first failing check matched the rule
Acknowledged at When a team member acknowledged it (if applicable)
Resolved at When the incident was marked resolved
Duration Time between started and resolved
Root cause Optional note added during resolution
Pulse AI analysis AI-generated analysis of the incident (Starter+ plans)

Incident Severity Levels

Severity is determined by the alert rule that triggered the incident:

Severity Meaning
Critical Immediate action required; major user impact
High Significant problem; should be addressed quickly
Medium Degraded performance or partial outage
Low Minor issue; investigate when available

You set the priority on each alert rule when you create it. See Setting Rule Priority to learn how priority maps to severity.

Automatic vs. Manual Creation

Incidents are always created automatically by alert rules — there is no manual "create incident" option in the interface. This keeps your incident history accurate and tied to real monitoring data.

If you want to track a manually detected problem, you can acknowledge and add root cause notes to the auto-created incident, or use the Resolve action with a note explaining what happened.

Auto-Resolution

When checks start passing again after an incident, PulseAPI can resolve the incident automatically once a configured number of consecutive successful checks occurs. Auto-resolution is linked to your alert rules.

If an incident isn't resolving automatically, see Why Didn't My Incident Auto-Resolve?.

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Still have questions? Contact support.

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