Actions & Delays

Define what happens when automation conditions are met—immediately or after a delay.

Upstat’s Automation Builder lets you specify one or more actions to take when automation conditions are met. Actions can run immediately or after a defined delay, enabling more intelligent and time-aware responses to ongoing incidents.

Supported Action Types

When an automation triggers, the following actions are currently supported:

Add Comment

Posts a system comment to the incident timeline.
This is useful for documenting automated observations or prompting follow-up.

Example:
“This incident is marked Critical and has not been acknowledged after 10 minutes.”

Send Notification

Sends a notification to a specific user.
Notifications are delivered in-app and may expand to other channels in the future.

Add Label

Adds a label to the incident for visibility and filtering.

Common use cases:

Apply customer-impacting to known client-facing incidents
Add needs-postmortem for critical incidents automatically

Using Delays in Automations

Automations support delayed actions, which execute only if the conditions are still true after the delay period.

This allows you to build logic such as:

If an incident is still unacknowledged after 10 minutes, then notify a secondary responder and add a comment.

The delay countdown begins when conditions are first met
If conditions are no longer true when the delay ends, the action is skipped
If conditions remain true, all actions run in the specified order

Multiple Actions Per Rule

You can define multiple actions in a single automation.
They are executed in the order listed when the rule triggers.

Example:

Add a comment noting the condition
Send a notification to a responder
Apply a severity-related label

Summary

Actions define what happens when your automation is triggered
You can send notifications, post comments, and apply labels
Delays allow conditional follow-up behavior over time
Multiple actions can be combined in a single rule

Learn more