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By the end of this guide, you’ll know how to create manual incidents, post updates, and resolve them — covering the full workflow for issues that automated monitors don’t catch.
For conceptual background, see Manual incidents.

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When to create a manual incident

  • A customer reports an issue that your monitors haven’t detected
  • A deployment caused problems visible to users but not to health checks
  • You’re proactively tracking a known degradation
  • An internal system is down but not covered by monitoring yet

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Full workflow

1

Create the incident

devhelm incidents create \
  --title "Checkout flow returning 500 for EU users" \
  --severity DOWN \
  --body "Customer reports started at 14:00 UTC. Affecting payment processing."
Manual incidents are immediately set to CONFIRMED — no waiting for trigger rules or confirmation.
2

Investigate and post updates

Keep your team informed as you investigate:
devhelm incidents update <incident-id> \
  --body "Identified root cause — EU payment gateway connection pool exhaustion" \
  --notify
Setting --notify sends the update through matched notification policies.
3

Associate with a monitor (optional)

If you find a related monitor, associate it for Dashboard visibility:
curl -X POST https://api.devhelm.io/api/v1/incidents \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $DEVHELM_API_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "title": "Checkout flow 500s",
    "severity": "DOWN",
    "monitorId": "<checkout-monitor-id>"
  }'
4

Resolve the incident

devhelm incidents resolve <incident-id> \
  --body "Deployed hotfix v2.4.1 — connection pool limits increased"

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Severity selection

SeverityWhen to use
DOWNComplete failure — users cannot use the feature
DEGRADEDPartial failure — feature works but is slow or unreliable
MAINTENANCEPlanned issue — you’re aware and working on it

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Alerting for manual incidents

Manual incidents flow through notification policies just like automated ones. If the incident is associated with a monitor, policies matching that monitor’s tags, type, or ID apply. Otherwise, only catch-all policies (empty matchRules) and policies with incident_status rules match.

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Next steps

Incident timeline

Review the full event history for an incident.

Incidents guide

Day-to-day incident management workflow.

Alerting guide

Configure how manual incident alerts are routed.