---
title: "Manage incidents in Grafana IRM | Grafana Cloud documentation"
description: "Learn how to manage incidents in Grafana IRM, from declaration through resolution and post-incident review."
---

# Incident management in Grafana IRM

Effective incident management is crucial for minimizing service disruption and ensuring prompt resolution. Grafana IRM provides a comprehensive set of tools to help teams coordinate their response efforts, document incidents, and resolve issues efficiently.

## Key incident response capabilities

Grafana IRM offers several essential capabilities to support your incident response process:

- **Incident declaration**: Quickly create incidents from anywhere in Grafana, Slack, or via API
- **Timeline documentation**: Maintain a chronological record of observations, metrics, and decisions
- **Team collaboration**: Add participants, assign roles, and track responsibilities
- **Task management**: Create, assign, and track action items throughout the incident lifecycle
- **Integration with tools**: Connect with monitoring, alerting, and communication systems
- **Post-incident analysis**: Review incident timelines to identify improvement opportunities

## Incident management workflow

Expand table

| Stage       | Description                           | Key features                                                                                                                             |
|-------------|---------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Declare     | Create an incident record             | [Declaration methods](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/manage-incidents/declare-incident), severity levels, labeling             |
| Document    | Maintain a record of the incident     | [Timeline](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/manage-incidents/incident-timeline), notes, queries, dashboard panels                |
| Collaborate | Work together to resolve the incident | [Add participants](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/manage-incidents/collaborate/add-participants), roles, integration for Slack |
| Resolve     | Track and complete action items       | [Task management](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/manage-incidents/collaborate/manage-tasks), status updates                    |

## In this section

- [**Declare an incident**](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/manage-incidents/declare-incident): Learn how to create incidents from various entry points
- [**Use the incident timeline**](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/manage-incidents/incident-timeline): Document the incident chronologically with notes, queries, and dashboard panels
- [**Collaborate during incidents**](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/manage-incidents/collaborate): Invite team members, assign roles, and manage participation
- [**Manage incident tasks**](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/manage-incidents/collaborate/manage-tasks): Create and track action items throughout the incident

## Additional incident management interfaces

Beyond the Grafana IRM UI, you can interact with incidents through:

- [**Grafana IRM integration for Slack**](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/integrations/chat-and-collaboration/slack): Manage incidents directly from Slack using `/grafana` commands
- [**Grafana IRM API**](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/reference): Programmatically create, update, and interact with incidents