How incidents work
DomainDash automatically detects problems so nothing slips through.
Overview
An incident is a record of something going wrong with one of your sites. When DomainDash detects a problem, like your site going down, an SSL certificate expiring, or DNS failing, it creates an incident automatically. When the problem goes away, the incident is resolved automatically too. There's nothing you need to do to open or close incidents; DomainDash handles the whole lifecycle for you.
Detection
DomainDash doesn't raise the alarm after a single failed check. Networks are noisy, and a one-off timeout doesn't necessarily mean your site is down. Instead, we use a confirmation process to make sure a problem is real before we tell you about it.
Here's what happens:
- A check comes back with a problem (for example, your site returns an error or doesn't respond at all).
- DomainDash creates an incident in a confirming state and starts counting.
- We keep checking. Each time the same problem comes back, the confirmation count goes up.
- Once enough consecutive checks confirm the problem, the incident is opened and you get notified.
The number of confirmations required depends on the severity of the problem. Critical issues like a site going completely down need fewer confirmations (so you hear about them faster), while less urgent things like a certificate approaching expiry need a few more checks to rule out false positives.
If the problem goes away before enough confirmations are reached, the incident is quietly discarded. You never even see it. This keeps your notifications clean and trustworthy.
Severity
Not all problems are equally urgent. DomainDash assigns a severity level to each incident based on what's gone wrong. The scale runs from P0 (most critical) to P3 (least urgent):
| Severity | Label | What triggers it |
|---|---|---|
| P0 | Critical | Your site is completely down, or your domain name has expired |
| P1 | Needs fixing | Your SSL certificate has expired or is invalid, or DNS resolution is failing |
| P2 | Needs attention | Your site is running slowly, or your SSL certificate is expiring soon |
| P3 | Worth knowing | Your domain name is expiring soon |
Severity affects two things:
- How quickly you're notified. P0 incidents trigger an urgent email to your entire team within about a minute of being confirmed. Lower-severity incidents are grouped into a daily digest instead.
- How many confirmations are needed. Critical and high-severity problems (P0 and P1) need 2 confirmations. Medium-severity issues (P2) need 3. Advisory items (P3) are opened after a single check.
What types of incident can be raised?
DomainDash monitors four aspects of your site and can raise incidents for each:
| Check type | Possible incidents |
|---|---|
| Uptime | Site is down, site is slow |
| SSL certificate | Certificate expired, certificate invalid, certificate expiring soon |
| DNS | Domain routing is failing |
| Domain registration | Domain expired, domain expiring soon |
Each incident type is tracked independently, so if your site goes down and your SSL certificate expires at the same time, you'll see two separate incidents, one for each problem.
Auto-resolution
When the underlying problem goes away, DomainDash resolves the incident automatically. There's nothing you need to do.
For example, if your site was down and starts responding again, DomainDash detects the recovery on the next check and:
- Marks the incident as resolved with a timestamp.
- Fires a recovery event so you can see exactly when things came back.
- For critical incidents (P0), sends a resolved notification to your team so everyone knows the crisis is over.
Incidents that were still in the confirming stage (not yet opened) are resolved silently. Since you were never notified about them, there's nothing to follow up on.
You can't manually close incidents
Incidents are tied to real monitoring data, so they're only resolved when DomainDash confirms the problem is gone. This keeps your incident history accurate and trustworthy. Every open incident genuinely represents an ongoing problem.
Related
- Notification channels to choose how you're alerted when something goes wrong
- Incident history to review past incidents and their timelines
- Uptime monitoring for how DomainDash checks whether your site is online