---
title: Internal notes
description: Private, team-only notes on an incident — with @mentions that email the person, pinning, emoji reactions and an activity-log trail. A plan feature.
canonical: https://watchfor.io/docs/alerting/internal-notes
---

# Internal notes

Private, team-only notes on an incident — with @mentions that email the person, pinning, emoji reactions and an activity-log trail. A plan feature.

While an incident is open, your team needs somewhere to coordinate that
**isn't** your public status page. That is what **internal notes** are for:
a thread on the incident page, visible only to members of your organization.

> **Info**
>
> Internal notes are a plan feature. If the section on the incident page shows
> as locked, they are not included in your current plan — see [pricing](/pricing).

## Team-only by design

Notes live on the incident page, below the root-cause analysis. They are
visible **only to your organization**: they never appear on a status page, in
customer-facing updates, in notifications or in the public API responses of a
status page. If a post-mortem is later published, notes stay private.

## What you can do

- **Write notes** as you investigate — findings, theories, links, next steps.
  Up to 5,000 characters each; up to 100 notes per incident.
- **@mention** teammates to pull them in. Type `@` and pick from the
  organization's members; each mentioned person gets an **email** with the
  note and a link to the incident. Editing a note re-notifies only newly
  added mentions.
- **Pin** the most important note so it stays at the top of the thread. The
  note's author, and owners and admins, can pin and unpin.
- **React** with an emoji — 👍 🎉 👀 ✅ ❤️ 🚀 to agree or cheer, 👎 ✔️ 🚫 ❌ as
  a quick verdict on a theory ("checked, not it") — to weigh in without
  adding noise.
- **Edit** your own notes (marked *edited*); **delete** your own, or any note
  if you are an owner or admin.

Notes are ordered pinned first, then oldest to newest, so the thread reads
like a log.

## Notes vs. status updates vs. post-mortems

| | Audience | Where it shows | When |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| **Internal note** | Your team only | Incident page | While investigating |
| **[Status update](/docs/status-pages/updates)** | Your customers | Status page | While the incident is public |
| **[Post-mortem](/docs/alerting/postmortems)** | Your team, optionally the public | Post-mortems section; status page if published | After the incident |

> **Info**
>
> Use internal notes for the messy reality of debugging, status updates for
> the clear customer-friendly summary, and the post-mortem for what you
> learned.

## Activity log

Creating, pinning and deleting notes is recorded in the organization's
[activity log](/docs/organization/activity-log) with the actor and time, so
the record of who said what during an incident is complete even if a note is
later removed.

---

Canonical page: https://watchfor.io/docs/alerting/internal-notes · All docs: https://watchfor.io/docs · Site guide: https://watchfor.io/llms.txt