Skip to main content
The fix that ends an incident is rarely the fix that stops it happening again. The mitigation held, but the test coverage that would have caught it is still missing, or the runbook everyone reached for is still out of date. Follow-ups are where that work goes, so it survives the incident being resolved instead of evaporating once the channel goes quiet. Follow-ups are one of three kinds of task in incident.io: Sometimes an action turns out to extend beyond resolving the incident. When that happens it shouldn’t hold the incident open, so turn it into a follow-up and it carries over to the work your team picks up afterwards. Every follow-up is open, completed, or not doing. Mark something as not doing when your team consciously decides against it, so it leaves the open list without vanishing from the record. How you create and manage follow-ups depends on whether you run incidents in Slack or Microsoft Teams. The dashboard works the same way for both.

​
Creating follow-ups

There are several ways to create a follow-up, so you can capture one without breaking off what you’re doing.

​
React with the :fast_forward: emoji

React to any message in an incident channel with :fast_forward: and we’ll turn it into a follow-up, using the message as the title. This is the quickest way to capture something mid-incident that clearly isn’t going to be done today.

​
Run /incident follow-up

Run /incident follow-up in an incident channel to open the Create follow-up modal. Add a title after the command to pre-fill it, for example /incident follow-up improve checkout test coverage.
Only the title is required. Everything else can wait until someone picks the work up. If you’ve set up teams you’ll also get a Team field here, and a Priority field once you’ve configured follow-up priorities.If the work already has a ticket, paste its link into the incident channel and we’ll offer to attach it as a follow-up. The follow-up is connected to that issue from the start, so its status stays in sync without anyone copying anything across.

​
From the dashboard

Open the incident’s Post-incident tab and select Add follow-up. The drawer that opens also has an Import tab, for bringing in a ticket that already exists in your issue tracker.

​
By asking @incident

Tag @incident in the incident channel and ask it to create a follow-up, or to change an existing one’s owner, status, priority, or title. The agent runs every change with your own permissions and records it against your name.

​
Via a workflow

Workflows can create follow-ups for you. Add the Create incident follow-ups step to a workflow, list the follow-ups you want, and they’ll be created automatically. The step can also set an assignee, description, labels, and priority.

​
Managing follow-ups

Follow-ups can be assigned, edited, completed, or dropped, from wherever you’re working.

​
Assigning follow-ups

Follow-ups can be owned by a person, by a Team, or by both. Assigning a team is useful when you know which team the work belongs to but not yet who will pick it up.When you assign someone, they’re notified so the work doesn’t sit unnoticed once the incident is over.

​
Tracking what’s open

Run /incident follow-ups to see every follow-up on the incident, grouped by status and showing who owns each one.
Each follow-up’s menu offers View follow-up, Edit follow-up, Mark as completed, Export, and Delete.Select Post open follow-ups in channel to share the outstanding list with everyone in the channel, which is a useful way to close out an incident.For a view across every incident, use the Follow-ups page in the dashboard, where you can filter, bulk-edit, and send reminders.

​
Exporting to your issue tracker

Most teams already track this kind of work somewhere else, so follow-ups are built to live in your issue tracker rather than compete with it. Choose Export from a follow-up’s menu and pick where it should go.
Once exported, the tracker owns the follow-up’s title, description, status, owner, and labels, and we keep our copy in step. See issue tracker sync for which trackers we support and exactly which fields sync in which direction.You don’t have to do this by hand. Set up auto-export and every follow-up lands in your tracker on its own, routed to the right project based on the incident it came from. That’s the difference between follow-ups being a chore someone has to remember and being work that simply appears in your team’s backlog.

​
FAQs

A person, a team, or both. Assigning a team is useful when the work clearly belongs to a group but nobody has picked it up yet. You can require an owner on every follow-up from Settings → Follow-ups, and choose whether that means a user, a team, or both.
In your issue tracker. Once a follow-up is exported, the tracker owns its title, description, status, owner, and labels, and we follow along. Follow-ups that haven’t been exported are edited in incident.io.
Yes, from Settings → Follow-ups. Until you do, priority is optional and new follow-ups take your default. Priorities also drive follow-up policies, which is how you hold teams to completing the important ones.
Filtering. Labels are free-form, so you can create them as you type, and they sync in from your issue tracker once a follow-up is exported to it.
Yes. The Follow-ups API lists them across every incident, with filters on incident, assignee team, and the created and updated timestamps, which is what makes incremental syncing possible.