Manual Incident Creation

There are a variety of reasons to design Incidents manually.

For example:

• An Incident Commander may recognize that an alert storm involves related Alerts; they can manually design Incidents that aggregate all the related Alerts.
• A particular type of Incident may have characteristics that reduce the likelihood that it is exactly identified by Incident Rules; manually creating a custom Incident allows for high specificity.
• An organization may have a workflow that suits its current needs; because it is not yet comfortable with the idea of automating Incident creation, it can manually create Incidents by using templates, by combining Alerts, by associating Alerts with existing Incidents, or by entering information to create custom Incidents on an ad hoc basis.

Creating Custom Incidents

To create a custom Incident manually, follow the directions below. This creates an Incident with no associated Alerts.

To manually create an incident

1. On the Incident Dashboard, click Create.
2. On the Create Incident page, fill in the fields about the Incident itself.
   Incident Alias, Incident Message, and Impacted Service are mandatory fields.

3. Select a Conference Bridge to use for the Incident (optional).
4. Select the I want to notify Stakeholders checkbox —  and enter a message and description to send Stakeholders when the Incident is triggered.
   The Stakeholder Description provides details for Stakeholders to know relevant details about the Incident.
5. Click Next to select additional Teams and individuals who need to be actively involved in resolving the Incident.

The Incident notifies Owner Team, who are the only ones who can acknowledge the Incident. Added Responder Teams are notified by separate Alerts. Added Responder Users will be added to Owner Alert as recipients and be notified by owner alert.

• The Incident Notifications flow for both Incidents and Alerts is based on the OpsGenie Incident Notification Flow.

6. Click Next to select Stakeholders.
   Add Stakeholders from across the organization in order to notify them about an Incident (through a variety of communication channels). Add them individually or configure Rules to select Stakeholders from user information that matches specific conditions.

• Start typing OpsGenie user names to add individual Stakeholders.
• Click + Add new type to begin entering Conditions for Rules.

• When Match all conditions is selected and multiple conditions are entered, any User selected must match all the conditions.

For example: if conditions include, “State is Virginia” and “City is Falls Church,” then OpsGenie only looks for users who are in Falls Church, Virginia —  and only sends Stakeholder notifications to those users.

7. Click Create.