---
title: Incident updates & maintenance
description: How incidents and scheduled maintenance appear on a status page — auto-published from monitors, written by hand, or announced from maintenance windows.
canonical: https://watchfor.io/docs/status-pages/updates
---

# Incident updates & maintenance

How incidents and scheduled maintenance appear on a status page — auto-published from monitors, written by hand, or announced from maintenance windows.

A status page isn't just a row of green dots — it's how you **communicate**
during an event. There are three sources of what appears on the page:
incidents auto-published from your monitors, announcements you write yourself,
and maintenance notices that come from maintenance windows.

## Auto-published incidents

With **Auto-publish incidents** on (the default for every page), a confirmed
[incident](/docs/alerting/incidents) on any monitor attached to the page
becomes a status-page incident within about a minute, with default wording and
the right component marked. When the internal incident resolves, the public
incident is resolved too.

You can edit an auto-published incident like any other — rewrite the title,
change the severity, add updates — and your wording is never overwritten by
the automation.

## Writing incident updates

Open the page in the dashboard and choose **New incident** (or open an
existing one) to post in your own words:

- **Status** moves through *Investigating → Identified → Monitoring →
  Resolved*. Picking a status pre-fills a conventional first message ("We are
  investigating an issue and will provide updates shortly.") that you can keep
  or replace; a custom message is never silently replaced.
- **Severity** — *minor*, *major* or *critical*. Critical shows the affected
  components as down; minor and major show them as degraded.
- **Affected components**, and optionally a subset of the monitors inside
  them.
- Each update is appended to the incident's **timeline**; resolving closes it
  and moves it to the history section, where it keeps its own incident page.

Edits and deletions are possible after the fact (fix a typo, adjust severity),
and every change is written to the [activity log](/docs/organization/activity-log).
These customer-facing updates are entirely separate from your team's
[internal notes](/docs/alerting/internal-notes), which are never shown publicly.

> **Also via API**
>
> Announcements are `POST /v1/status-pages/{id}/announcements` — see the
> [status pages API](/docs/api/status-pages). The classic use is posting the
> problem and the all-clear straight from your incident tooling.

## Scheduled maintenance

Planned work is announced from
[maintenance windows](/docs/monitors/maintenance#announce-on-your-status-page)
— the single source of truth — by turning on the window's status-page
announcement. You can't post maintenance directly on the page; that keeps an
unplanned outage from being relabelled "maintenance" after the fact.

- A **Scheduled maintenance** notice appears ahead of time, listing the
  affected components.
- It tracks the window: *Scheduled → In progress → Completed*.
- While the window is active, affected components show as **maintenance**
  (blue), [alerts are suppressed](/docs/monitors/maintenance) and the time is
  neutral for uptime — not downtime.
- Incidents entirely covered by a maintenance window are hidden from the
  page's active list and history; the maintenance notice speaks for them.

## Publishing a post-mortem

When an incident on the page links back to an internal incident and your team
has completed a [post-mortem](/docs/alerting/postmortems) and switched on
**Publish to status page**, the public incident page shows it — title,
severity, root-cause category, the write-up and the follow-up actions (without
assignee names). Nothing is published unless an owner or admin explicitly
chooses to.

> **Info**
>
> Pair calm public updates with detailed internal notes: customers get the
> summary and the ETA, your team keeps the investigation private.

---

Canonical page: https://watchfor.io/docs/status-pages/updates · All docs: https://watchfor.io/docs · Site guide: https://watchfor.io/llms.txt