How do I track uptime history and incident reports for my team?

A good way to track uptime history and incident reports is to use two linked records:

1. Uptime/SLA history — a running log of service availability over time
2. Incident reports — detailed postmortems for anything that impacted availability

1) Track uptime history

Use a monitoring tool or a simple database/spreadsheet to record:

• Service name
• Start/end time
• Status: up / degraded / down
• Duration
• Affected users/systems
• Root cause (if known)
• Detection source (monitor, user report, manual)
• Resolution time
• SLA impact or downtime minutes

Useful metrics

• Uptime % = (total time - downtime) / total time × 100
• MTTR (Mean Time to Recover) = average time to restore service
• MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) = average time between incidents

Best practices

• Automate monitoring with alerts.
• Keep timestamps in one timezone (UTC is easiest).
• Segment by service, region, or environment.
• Preserve historical records instead of overwriting.

2) Track incident reports

For each incident, document:

• Incident ID
• Title / summary
• Severity
• Date/time started and resolved
• Impact
• What happened
• Root cause
• Immediate fix
• Long-term corrective actions
• Owner
• Status: open, investigating, resolved, postmortem complete

Incident report template

Incident ID:
Title:
Date/Time Detected:
Date/Time Started:
Date/Time Resolved:
Severity:
Services Affected:
Impact:
Detection Method:
Root Cause:
Timeline:
Resolution:
Preventive Actions:
Owner:
Links/Attachments:

3) Connect uptime history to incidents

A simple pattern is:

• Every incident creates one or more downtime entries
• Each downtime entry rolls up into your uptime history
• At the end of the month/quarter, generate:
  • uptime by service
  • incident count by severity
  • total downtime
  • recurring root causes

4) Tools you can use

Depending on team size:

Lightweight

• Google Sheets / Excel
• Notion / Airtable
• Jira + incident templates

Monitoring + incident management

• Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus + Grafana
• PagerDuty, Opsgenie, FireHydrant, Rootly
• Statuspage for public-facing status history

5) Recommended workflow

1. Monitoring detects an issue
2. Alert triggers incident creation
3. Incident is tracked live in a shared channel/ticket
4. After resolution, write a postmortem
5. Update uptime log with exact downtime
6. Review trends monthly

If you want, I can give you:

• a spreadsheet template,
• a Notion/Jira incident template, or
• a database schema for tracking uptime and incidents.