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Custom Statuses

Define and manage your own status workflow for tracking incidents.

Upstat allows you to fully customize the statuses used to track incidents from start to finish. This lets your team define a status model that matches your real-world process—whether it’s minimal or highly detailed.

What Are Incident Statuses?

Statuses represent the lifecycle stages of an incident, such as:

  • Identified
  • Investigating
  • Mitigated
  • Resolved
  • Closed

You can change, reorder, or rename these to fit your team’s needs.

Creating and Managing Statuses

  1. Go to Project Settings → Incidents → Statuses
  2. You’ll see a list of current statuses
  3. You can:
    • Rename any existing status
    • Reorder statuses using drag-and-drop
    • Add new statuses
    • Delete unused ones (as long as they’re not in use)

Each status is represented as a column in Kanban view, and as a value in the List view and filters.

Defining the “Closed” Status

One important distinction: you explicitly define which status is considered “Closed.”

Why this matters:

  • The incident timer stops once it reaches the “Closed” status
  • It will fall off the Kanban board after 2 weeks
  • It affects MTTA and MTTR reporting
  • Automations and filters can treat it as a final/terminal state

The name of the status does not determine whether it’s closed—the designation is independent.

You can have a status named Postmortem Complete that behaves as the “Closed” status if you designate it that way.

Status Design Tips

  • Keep the number of statuses manageable (3–7 is common)
  • Use terms your team already uses in ticket systems
  • One status must be designated as “Closed”

Filtering and Views

Statuses are:

  • Used as columns in Kanban View
  • Filterable in List View and search
  • Available as automation conditions
  • Logged in the incident timeline

Summary

  • You can define your own incident status workflow per project
  • The “Closed” designation is functional, not name-based
  • Status changes are key triggers for reporting and automation
  • Custom statuses improve clarity and reflect your team’s real-world process

Learn more