The Past Incidents feature allows incident responders to view past incidents that have similar metadata and were generated on the same service as their current active incident. Past Incidents adds helpful context for accurate triage, which can lead to shorter resolution time. Responders can see whether they or someone on their team had been involved in a previous incident, when these types of incidents have happened, and dive into incident details to discover what remediation steps were taken in the past.

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Availability

This feature is available with our PagerDuty AIOps add-on, or with Legacy Event Intelligence. If you would like to sign up for a trial of PagerDuty AIOps features, please read PagerDuty AIOps Trials.

View Past Incidents

The Past Incidents feature is surfaced in multiple places:

• Web app
• Mobile app
• REST API

Web App

1. From the Incidents page or a service’s page, click your desired incident’s Title.
2. On the incident’s detail page, select the Past Incidents tab.

Mobile App

In the mobile app:

1. Select an incident to navigate to its details page.
2. Scroll down to the section Past Incidents and tap View Past Incidents.

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Tip

On the Past Incidents screen, select an incident to navigate to its details page.

Sort Order

You can adjust whether the list of Past Incidents sorts by recency or relevance.

1. At the top of the screen, tap Recent .

2. Select Recent or Relevant.

REST API

To access Past Incidents via API, please visit our API documentation.

Past Incidents Details and Behavior

The Past Incidents feature uses machine learning to display a historical list of incidents from the same service that are similar to the incident you are currently investigating. Past Incidents are determined by four main factors:

• The semantics of the incident title.
• Which responders have responded to past incidents.
• The duration of the past incident.
• The date and time of the past incident’s creation.

The Past Incidents heatmap provides a high-level overview of incidents similar to the one you are viewing that have been observed for the past six months on that service. Darker squares on the heatmap represent days when a higher concentration of past incidents while lighter squares will have a lower concentration. The legend for the number of past incidents will dynamically change relative to the range of past incidents observed in a single day.

To drill down to a specific day, you can hover over a square to view the titles of the past incidents from that day. If you click on a square, the top five past incidents from that day will populate below in the Past Incidents list. You can then easily access those incidents for additional context by clicking on the linked incident title.

The Past Incidents list displays historical incidents with specific metadata fields and links. For each past incident, you can see the incident title, the duration of the incident, the date the incident was created, and the person who last changed this incident.

Title: The incident title in its current state. If the incident title was manually edited, the final title will be displayed here.

Duration: Duration of the incident.

Created: Date and time the incident was created.

Last Changed By: The PagerDuty user who last made a change to this incident. If this incident was not edited by any PagerDuty user, this field will be blank, “--”. This can happen, for example, if the incident was triggered and then resolved by the integrated monitoring tools.

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Important Notes

• Past Incidents will only return incidents from the same service as the incident you are viewing.

• If you would like to hide Past Incidents, please contact PagerDuty Support.

FAQ

Can I tell the system that an incident in the Past Incidents list is not similar to my current incident?

How is this different from Alert Grouping?

Do suppressed alerts show up in Past Incidents?

Can I see Past Incidents when I write up my postmortems?