Recipe: Public status page incident writer

Prerequisites

• Owner or Editor role on the Meridian team.
• At least one component configured in your status page.
• Incident template created (optional but recommended).

Step 1 — Open the incident composer

Navigate to Dashboard → Status → Incidents and click New incident. The composer loads a split-pane view: editor on the left, live preview on the right.

Step 2 — Set severity and affected components

Choose one of four severities: Investigating, Degraded, Partial Outage, or Major Outage. Tick every component experiencing impact. The status page will automatically reflect the worst severity across selected components.

Step 3 — Write the initial update

Use a template or write freeform. Keep the first sentence customer-facing and jargon-free. Example:

“We are investigating elevated error rates on the API gateway. Some requests may return 502 responses.”

Step 4 — Publish or schedule

Click Publish now to push the incident live immediately, or set a future timestamp to coordinate with an internal bridge call. Subscribers receive notifications based on their channel preferences.

Step 5 — Post updates during the incident

Each update can change severity, add or remove components, and include a new message body. All updates appear chronologically on the public page. Meridian timestamps every update in the subscriber's local timezone.

Step 6 — Resolve and link a retrospective

When the incident is resolved, set severity to Resolved and optionally attach a retrospective URL. The status page shows a green “Resolved” banner and moves the incident to the history timeline.