Incident Management
FanDesk Incidents is a full incident management system for tracking, responding to, and learning from production issues. From creation to postmortem, every incident has a clear owner, a structured timeline, and a path to resolution.
What Is an Incident?
An incident is any unplanned event that disrupts or threatens to disrupt your service:
- System outages and service unavailability
- Security breaches or vulnerabilities
- Performance degradation affecting users
- Data integrity issues
- Infrastructure failures (hardware, network, cloud provider)
Not every bug is an incident. Incidents are significant events requiring coordinated response, time tracking, and formal documentation.
Accessing Incidents
The Incidents module is available in the sidebar for:
- Organization admins and super admins
- Users designated as incident responders by an admin
If you don't see Incidents in your sidebar, ask your admin to grant you access.
Incident Lifecycle
Every incident follows a structured lifecycle:
Triggered
The incident has been created — either manually by a team member or via a future webhook integration. The clock starts for MTTA (Mean Time to Acknowledge).
Acknowledged
A responder has confirmed they are actively working the incident. This stops the MTTA clock and signals to the team that the incident has an owner.
Investigating
Active troubleshooting is underway. The responder posts updates to the incident timeline as they make progress. Team members can follow along in real time.
Resolved
The issue is fixed and service is restored. MTTR (Mean Time to Resolution) is recorded automatically. The incident is closed but preserved for postmortem and analytics.
Postmortem
After resolution, the team documents what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent it in the future. Action items created in the postmortem become trackable FanDesk tasks.
Severity Levels
| Severity | Impact | Expected Response |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | Major outage, all or most users affected | Immediate — within minutes |
| High | Significant impact, many users affected | Within 1 hour |
| Medium | Partial impact, workaround available | Within 4 hours |
| Low | Minor issue, limited or no user impact | Within 24 hours |
Severity level affects auto-assignment priority rules and notification urgency.
Incident Categories
Classify incidents by the nature of the problem:
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| Outage | Service completely unavailable |
| Security | Security breach, vulnerability, or suspicious activity |
| Performance | Service is slow, degraded, or unreliable |
| Bug | Software defect causing user-facing issues |
| Infrastructure | Hardware, network, or cloud infrastructure failure |
| Data | Data integrity, loss, or corruption issue |
Categories are used to route incidents to the right response team automatically.
WhatsApp Notifications
FanDesk can send WhatsApp alerts for critical incidents to ensure responders are reached immediately — even if they are not actively monitoring FanDesk:
- Configure WhatsApp notification recipients in Settings > Incidents > Notifications
- Critical and High severity incidents trigger WhatsApp messages automatically
- WhatsApp number must be set in each responder's Profile Settings > Contact Info > WhatsApp
This ensures no critical incident goes unacknowledged, even outside business hours.
Next: Learn about creating and responding to incidents in Incident Response.
Need help? Contact us at hello@fandesk.ai