Severity and Status Reference

Incidents in Upstat use severity levels and statuses to track impact and progress.

Severity Levels

Severity indicates the impact of an incident on your services and users.

Level	Typical Use
Critical	Complete service outage affecting all users
High	Major functionality impaired, significant user impact
Medium	Partial degradation, some users affected
Low	Minor issue, minimal user impact

Severity levels are fixed and cannot be customized.

Statuses track where an incident is in its lifecycle. Common statuses include:

Status	Description
Identified	Problem has been recognized
Investigating	Team is analyzing the root cause
Mitigated	A fix is in place, monitoring continues
Resolved	Issue has been fixed and validated

Projects can define their own status values. Statuses can be:

One status must be designated as the “closed” status. This designation:

Stops the incident timer for reporting metrics
Removes the incident from the active Kanban view after 2 weeks
Affects MTTA (Mean Time to Acknowledge) and MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve) calculations

The closed designation is independent of the status name. A status named “Postmortem Complete” can function as the closed status.

Labels are tags that categorize incidents for filtering and reporting.

Property	Description
Name	Display text for the label
Color	Visual identifier in the UI

Labels are defined per project and shared across all incidents in that project. An incident can have multiple labels.