The Past Incidents feature allows incident responders to view historical incidents that had 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 receive the following helpful information:

• Whether they, or someone on their team, was involved in a previous incident.
• When these types of incidents happened.
• Incident details that show what remediation steps were taken in the past.

View Past Incidents

You can see the Past Incidents feature 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 to the section Past Incidents and tap View Past Incidents.

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View Incident Details

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, visit the 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 on the same service from the past six months that are similar to the one you are viewing. Darker squares on the heatmap represent days with a higher concentration of past incidents, while lighter squares indicate a lower concentration. The legend for the number of past incidents dynamically changes relative to the range of past incidents observed in a single day.

To view more details for a specific day, you can hover over a square to see past incidents' titles. Click on a square to populate the top five past incidents from that day in the Past Incidents list. You can then easily access those incidents for additional context by clicking 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 following:

• Title: The incident title in its current state. If the incident title was manually edited, the final title is 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 is 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 only returns incidents from the same service as the incident you are viewing.

• To hide Past Incidents, contact PagerDuty Support.

FAQ

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

There are no configuration options for Past Incidents. PagerDuty welcomes your comments and feedback for what you would like to configure about Past Incidents.

How is this different from Alert Grouping?

Alert Grouping combines alerts that are currently part of the same incident. In contrast, Past Incidents looks at similar incidents from any point in time to help you get the context needed to resolve an incident.

Do suppressed alerts show up in Past Incidents?

No, the goal of Past Incidents is to show relevant incidents from your incident management history. If you have decided to suppress alerts on a service, those alerts are not part of your service's history. PagerDuty takes that as an indication that those alerts are not relevant to the current incident and therefore are not displayed under Past Incidents.