How incidents work: Sorry™ vs Statuspage

Understanding incidents

Most status page tools treat incidents as the primary way of communicating outages and performance issues. When you create an incident, you're sharing what's affected and the current status. During an incident, you might share multiple updates to keep affected users informed.

In both Sorry™ and Atlassian Statuspage, you can publish an unlimited number of incidents on any plan.

Functionality comparison

Publishing incidents in Sorry™

In Sorry™, all communications — whether it's an active outage, planned maintenance, or a historic event you're documenting — are created through the same workflow as a "notice."

Step 1: Choose notice type

When you create a notice, you choose from three types:

• Current incident: for active outages or degradations happening now
• Planned maintenance: for scheduled work you want to communicate in advance
• Historic incident: for documenting past events that affected service

This unified approach means your team learns one workflow regardless of what you're communicating.

Step 2: Select affected component(s) and set the incident status

Once you've selected the notice type (for this guide, we'll create a current incident), select the affected components and set the incident's current status.

Components are the services, features, or products related to the incident. Any component you select will appear as "degraded" on the status page.

The current status tells stakeholders what's currently happening with the incident.

Step 3: Write the incident message

Next, you can choose a template or write a one-off incident. We provide out-of-the-box templates you can use, or you can create your own.

Step 4: Turn on / off notifications

The final step in publishing an incident notice in Sorry™ is deciding whether to send notifications to your subscribers or just publish the incident to your status page.

You can also change the default notification option to either setting.

Step 5: Publish the incident

Finally, you click Review & Publish Notice, and a confirmation modal appears. This modal serves as a safety net before publishing your incident.

Clicking Yes, Publish instantly publishes the incident to your status page.

Incident templates in Sorry™

Incident templates help you communicate quickly. Sorry™ lets you create shared (global) templates, page-specific templates, and templates for specific types of updates. This flexibility keeps your template options relevant to the services on that page and to the incident's status.

Publishing incidents in Statuspage

Atlassian Statuspage separates incident creation into two distinct workflows: one for incidents and one for scheduled maintenance events. Let's walk through the incident creation workflow as we did above with Sorry™.

Step 1: Choose incident type

On the incidents screen, you can create an incident or a scheduled maintenance item. You can also view open incidents and manage your incident templates from this screen.

Here, you select Incidents and click Create incident.

Step 2: Name the incident

Here, you set the incident name and status. You have the option to select an incident template or write your own incident name.

This is also where you can create a historical incident.

Step 3: Choose affected components and set their status

Below the incident message, you can select which components are affected by the incident and change their status. This is an added layer of complexity and control, which may or may not be necessary for your team.

Step 4: Turn on / off notifications

Like in Sorry™, you can control whether or not to send notifications for each incident. However, Atlassian does not allow this to be checked by default; you must manually check it for every incident you want to send notifications for.

Step 5: Configure admin reminders

Atlassian Statuspage lets admins turn on default reminders or customize their own reminder cadence so that status page admins remember to update the status page.

Step 6: Publish the incident

Finally, you click Create to publish the incident. There is no confirmation modal in Atlassian Statuspage, so you need to make sure you're ready to publish the incident, especially if you're sending notifications.

Templates

Statuspage lets you create template groups to organize your templates. This is great if you have only a handful of templates, but it can become unwieldy to manage as your template library grows.

What customers see

The customer view of incidents varies across products.

Sorry™

On the main status page view, Sorry™ shows a high-level overview of the incident, including the incident status, subject, message, and affected components.

Users can click View notice to see a more comprehensive view of the incident.

Statuspage

In Statuspage, the main page shows an overview of the incident, including the incident name, status, message, and the option to subscribe to the individual incident.

Clicking the incident name opens a more detailed view of the incident.

A simpler approach to incident communication

When we designed the incident creation workflow for Sorry™, we focused on streamlining the process and reducing the steps between discovering an outage and communicating it to your customers and stakeholders.

The review modal was a deliberate choice. Publishing an incident without a final confirmation step can lead to typos, incorrect components, or notifications sent to the wrong subscribers. A quick review takes seconds and prevents mistakes that can confuse customers or require follow-up corrections.

We also prioritized sensible default notification settings. Setting notifications to "on" by default means your team doesn't have to remember to check that box during every incident.

The result is incident communication that's fast and easy to get right.

Additional resources

• Sorry™ | Notice and component statuses
• Atlassian | Create an incident

Try the Sorry™ incident workflow today

Interested in seeing it for yourself? Reach out to schedule a demo, or sign up for a free trial.