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Declaring an incident takes seconds, and you can do it right from where your team already works, whether that’s Slack or Microsoft Teams. You can declare three types of incident: a live incident for something happening right now, a retrospective incident to document something that already happened, and a test incident to practice without affecting production. Whichever type you declare, the form is fully customizable, so your team captures exactly the context it needs. See incident forms to tailor which fields appear.

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Declare with /incident or /inc

From any channel in Slack, type /incident or /inc and press Enter to open the incident declaration form. To pre-fill the title, add it after the command (e.g. /inc Website is down).
Typing /inc in Slack shows the incident.io command options

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Declare from an existing message

Sometimes the first sign of an incident is a message that’s already been posted, such as a report in your #customer-support or #legal channel, a heads-up in a Slack Connect channel with a customer, or a direct message from a colleague. You can declare an incident straight from that message so the context comes with it.Click the three dots in the top-right corner of the message, choose Connect to apps, then Create an incident.
The Connect to apps menu on a Slack message, showing Create an incident
If you don’t see it, choose More message shortcuts from the same menu.

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Declare from your browser

Head to inc.new to create a new incident. Fill out the details and hit Declare, just as if you’d used the slash command. You can switch between live, retrospective, and test incidents from the tabs at the top of the form.
Declaring an incident from the browser at inc.new

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What happens next

As soon as you declare, we automatically set up your incident response workspace:
  • A dedicated Slack channel that brings responders, updates, and actions together in one place.
  • A video call for a digital war room, using Google Meet, Zoom, or another provider.
  • A linked ticket in your issue tracker, like Jira or Linear, keeping the work visible where your engineers already are.
  • A heads-up in your announcements channel, #incidents by default.
From there, workflows automate the rest of your process, like assigning roles, posting status updates, and more.

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FAQs

By default, anyone can declare an incident. Admins can restrict who can declare a particular incident type, for example limiting a security incident to your security team.
You can configure which fields are required and which are optional, so an incident can be declared with just a few details. Anything filled in is easy to change later during the incident.
Yes, if private incidents are enabled for your workspace. The declaration form will include an option to make the incident private, visible only to invited responders.