What is Upstat?
Understand the purpose of Upstat and how to navigate this documentation.
Upstat is an incident management and monitoring platform designed to help teams detect, respond, and learn from system failures.
This documentation provides technical guidance on how to use Upstat effectively—across monitoring, incident response, on-call scheduling, automations, and status communication.
Problem Domain
Operating modern software systems requires coordinating multiple responsibilities:
- Detecting outages across services, APIs, and regions
- Assigning and managing on-call coverage
- Communicating clearly with internal and external stakeholders
- Understanding the impact of issues across systems and customers
- Automating common response workflows
- Capturing post-incident context for future reference
These activities are often handled by fragmented tools, shared spreadsheets, or custom scripts—leading to delays, duplication, and lack of visibility across teams.
Upstat’s Approach
Upstat consolidates the core operational pillars into a single platform:
- Monitoring – Define monitors for HTTP endpoints, SSL certs, and background jobs
- Incident Management – Track incidents from detection to resolution with structured roles, statuses, and labels
- On-Call Scheduling – Manage shifts, substitutions, and escalations across timezones and teams
- Catalog – Maintain a central inventory of services, products, and dependencies for context
- Automations – Trigger actions based on events like monitor failures or incident transitions
- Status Pages – Communicate downtime and ongoing issues internally or publicly
- Notifications – Deliver targeted alerts through multiple channels to reduce noise and improve response
Upstat is designed to be straightforward to operate.
How to Use This Documentation
This documentation is organized by domain. You can jump into any section based on what you’re trying to configure, investigate, or integrate.
[Placeholder: Navigation Buttons to Monitoring, Incidents, On-Call, Catalog, etc.]
Each section provides:
- Definitions and behavioral models
- Setup instructions and configuration steps
- Visual references (with screenshots and UI cues)
- Usage best practices
- Limitations and design decisions, where relevant
Who This Is For
This documentation is intended for:
- Engineers and SREs configuring monitoring, automations, and response flows
- Team leads and managers setting up on-call coverage and status pages
- Customer support and operations teams reviewing incidents or communicating externally
- Anyone maintaining system visibility, reliability, and response workflows
Getting Started
If you’re new to Upstat, start with: