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Draft incidents let you catch false alarms before your subscribers see them. When a monitor detects a failure, the incident is created but hidden from the public status page until you confirm it’s real.

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Why Use Drafts?

Without drafts, a transient network blip triggers a public incident, emails all your subscribers, and posts to your Slack channel — then resolves 30 seconds later. Draft mode prevents that.
Without draftsWith drafts
Monitor fails → public incident → subscriber emails sentMonitor fails → draft incident → you review → publish when confirmed
False alarm visible to all usersFalse alarm caught before anyone sees it
Must resolve quickly to limit damageReview at your pace, discard or publish

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Enabling Draft Mode

  1. Go to Settings > Automation
  2. Set Auto-incident visibility to Create as draft
  3. Optionally set an Auto-publish delay
  4. Click Save Automation Settings

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The Draft Lifecycle

Monitor detects failure
        |
        v
  Safeguard checks pass
  (threshold, cooldown, dedup, etc.)
        |
        v
  Incident created as DRAFT
  - Not visible on public status page
  - No subscriber notifications sent
  - Visible in dashboard with "Draft" badge
        |
        +--> You review in dashboard
        |         |
        |    Real issue? -----> Click "Publish" -----> Public on status page
        |         |                                     Subscriber notifications sent
        |    False alarm? ---> Resolve it ------------> Never seen by subscribers
        |
        +--> Auto-publish timer expires (if configured)
                  |
                  v
             Automatically published
             Subscriber notifications sent

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Reviewing Drafts

Draft incidents appear in Dashboard > Incidents with a yellow Draft badge. They work like regular incidents — you can add updates, change status, and link services — but they’re invisible to the public. To find drafts quickly, use the visibility filter and select Drafts.

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Publishing a Draft

Click the Publish button on any draft incident card. The incident immediately becomes visible on your public status page and subscriber notifications are sent.

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Discarding a False Alarm

If the draft is a false positive, just resolve it normally. Since it was never published, no subscribers were notified and it never appeared on the status page. It stays in your resolved incidents history for internal reference.

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Auto-Publish

If you want a review window without requiring manual intervention, set an auto-publish delay:
  1. Go to Settings > Automation
  2. Set Auto-publish delay to your review window (e.g., 5 minutes)
DelayBehavior
0Drafts stay as drafts until you manually publish or resolve
5 minYou have 5 minutes to review; if you don’t act, it publishes automatically
30 minLonger review window for teams that check less frequently
If you resolve the incident before the auto-publish timer expires, it’s discarded without ever going public.

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Notifications and Drafts

Draft incidents hold all subscriber notifications until published:
EventDraftPublic
Incident createdNo notificationsNotifications sent immediately (or batched)
Incident updatedNo notificationsNotifications sent
Incident publishedNotifications sent nowN/A (already public)
Incident resolved while draftNo notifications everNotifications sent
Team members still see drafts in the dashboard — drafts only hide from the public status page and subscriber notifications.

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Using Workflows with Drafts

If you use workflows, you can build different automation for drafts vs. confirmed incidents:
  • incident.created fires for both drafts and public incidents
  • incident.published fires only when a draft becomes public
Common pattern: send an internal Slack alert when a draft is created so your team can review it, and only page on-call when the incident is published.

Workflow examples for drafts

See example workflow configurations for draft review alerts and publish-triggered paging.

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Drafts and Safeguards

Draft mode is one part of the incident safeguards system. It works alongside:
  • Flap protection — requires consecutive failures before even creating a draft
  • Cooldown — prevents rapid duplicate drafts for the same monitor
  • Notification batching — coalesces notifications when drafts are published close together
  • Maintenance awareness — skips incident creation entirely during scheduled maintenance
These safeguards apply before the draft is created. Drafts are for the incidents that pass all automated checks but you still want human review before going public.