Grafana Cloud Grafana Incident Configure settings for Grafana Incident

Configure settings for Grafana Incident

Grafana Incident has several customizable settings that allow you to define all aspects of an incident to fit your response needs and team workflows. With these settings, you can:

• Add incident labels
• Define incident severities and statuses
• Customize Slack channel prefixes

Note: Grafana Cloud Admins can access incident settings.

About incident labels

Annotating incidents with labels helps you filter and better understand incident trends overtime. Use labels to group incidents and tag them with interesting metadata such as which teams were involved, what services were impacted, and if customers were impacted.

Use the + Add Label option in the incident card to apply labels. You can apply labels to both active and resolved incidents.

Add incident labels

1. In Grafana Incident, navigate to the Settings tab.
2. Under Incident Labels, click + Add Label.
3. Provide a name and description for the label.
4. Optional: Assign a color from the hue wheel or leave the default color.
5. Click Save and repeat steps 2-4 as needed. right corner.

For example, suppose you want labels to track incidents by teams involved. Create team-based labels as shown in the following image:

Edit incident labels

1. In Grafana Incident, navigate to the Settings tab.
2. Hover over an existing label and click the pencil icon.
3. Edit the name, description, or color as needed and click Save.

About incident severities

Incident severities provide a defined measurement of the impact of an incident. Consistent and well-defined severities help others in your organization quickly understand the urgency of an incident.

Incident severities may influence your response process, such as how many people are engaged and who to inform. To get the most value out of incident severities, establish clear definitions of each severity level and the expected response within your organization.

The following recommended incident severities are pre-configured in Grafana Incident:

Edit incident severities

You can customize the severity label and description fields to match the severity levels your team uses.

1. In Grafana Incident, navigate to the Settings tab.
2. Select an existing severity to edit the label and description fields.
3. Once you’re done editing, click Save in the upper right corner.

Note: To ensure your custom severities levels are mapped to the corresponding severity level in Grafana Incident, define your highest severity with the pre-configured critical severity.

For example, suppose your severity levels are defined as P1-P4:

About incident statuses

The status of an incident indicates whether the incident is ongoing or if the issue has been resolved. The incident status should immediately indicate whether or not incident response is still in progress.

The following incident statuses are pre-configured in Grafana Incident:

Edit incident statuses

Customize what you call active and resolved incidents:

1. In Grafana Incident, navigate to the Settings tab.
2. Scroll down to Statuses and edit the label and description as needed.
3. Click Save in the upper right corner.

About channel prefixes

Having a central and dedicated place for incident response to take place can be helpful to keep communication organized during an incident and improve analysis for post-incident reviews. Prefixes determine the name of automatically created incident channels. For example, if the channel prefix is security then the channel name will be #security-date-title

Tip: To maintain searchable and easy to manage incident channels, consider customizing your channel prefixes for different teams or services.

Edit channel prefixes

To customize Slack channel prefixes:

1. In Grafana Incident, navigate to the Settings tab.
2. Navigate to Prefixes at the bottom of the Settings page.
3. Click + Add Prefix and provide a name and description.
4. Edit any existing prefixes and click Save.

Once your prefixes are defined, you can specify which prefix to use when you declare an incident in Grafana Incident.