incident.io offers four incident modes to help your team effectively manage and respond to various situations. These are different to Incident types, which can be used to tailor your response process to the situation you're responding to e.g. you could create a security incident type with a completely different incident lifecycle & form to your standard default incidents.

Below, we'll explore the details of each incident mode:

The Tutorial Incident mode is a quick 5-minute guide to cover the basics of using incident.io and is an excellent way for users to familiarize themselves with the platform and its features.
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To initiate a Tutorial Incident, simply type /inc tutorial in any of your Slack channels.

✨ Learning is free at incident.io. Everyone in your company can - and should! - learn the ropes of incident.io without you getting penalized by it and billed.

So, don't worry: your teammates won't be considered Responders (paid users) if they go through our tutorial flow 🙂

The Test Incident mode is designed for testing new automations and conducting dry runs with your configuration without affecting production systems or unnecessarily bothering your colleagues. To create a Test Incident, type /incident test from any Slack channel or use the declare incident button in our dashboard and switch to the Test incident tab.

While Test Incidents share similarities with normal incidents, they are distinguished by the fact that they won't be announced in the #incidents channel, won't be included in your incident library, and won't be calculated as part of Insights.

The Real Incident mode is used for live incidents when something has gone wrong, and immediate response is required. There are three ways to manually declare a Real Incident:

Slack Command: Type /incident or /inc from any Slack channel.

Slack Message: Turn a Slack message into an incident by clicking the three built-in dots and selecting 'create an incident.'

Dashboard: Create an incident directly from the incident.io dashboard.

Retrospective Incidents are used to record incidents after they have occurred and can only be declared via the API or our dashboard.

To declare a Retrospective Incident, use the 'Declare Incident' button on your dashboard and click on the Retrospective incident tab.

To keep things tidy, we only show your real incidents by default within the incidents section of the dashboard. To view a list of incidents in any other mode, you can simply filter by incident mode wherever appropriate:

You can create an incident in any of these modes via the API by passing the mode parameter.