Timeline & activity log

The timeline is a chronological record of everything that happens during an incident. It provides a complete audit trail for postmortems, compliance reviews, and operational transparency.

What is logged

Every significant action on an incident generates a timeline event:

Event type	Description
Status change	Incident moved to a new status (e.g., Investigating to Identified)
Severity change	Incident severity updated (e.g., P2 upgraded to P1)
Commander assignment	A new Commander is assigned or reassigned
Responder assignment	A Responder is added to or removed from the incident
Comment	A team member adds a note or update
External update	Status page update published or stakeholder notification sent
Integration event	Activity from connected tools (Jira, Slack, PagerDuty, etc.)

Viewing the timeline

Open any incident detail page and scroll to the Timeline section. Events are displayed in reverse chronological order with the most recent at the top.

Each event shows:

• Timestamp -- exact date and time in UTC, with your local timezone displayed alongside.
• Actor -- the user or system that triggered the event.
• Description -- human-readable summary of what happened.
• Metadata -- additional context such as previous and new values for changes.

Adding comments

Any team member assigned to the incident can add comments. Comments support markdown formatting and can include code blocks, links, and images.

Comments are useful for:

• Sharing investigation findings as they emerge.
• Noting decisions and their rationale.
• Providing ETAs and progress updates.
• Documenting workarounds that were tried.

Filtering and searching

Use the filter bar above the timeline to narrow events by type:

• Filter by event type (status changes, comments, assignments, etc.).
• Filter by actor to see only actions from a specific team member.
• Search within comments and descriptions using full-text search.

Timeline in postmortems

When you create a postmortem from an incident, Batida imports the full timeline as a reference. This gives the postmortem author a complete record to work from, reducing the time needed to reconstruct what happened.

API access

Retrieve timeline events programmatically:

GET /api/v1/incidents/{incident_id}/timeline
Authorization: Bearer <token>

Response:

{
  "events": [
    {
      "id": "evt_001",
      "type": "status_change",
      "actor": "usr_abc123",
      "description": "Status changed from Investigating to Identified",
      "previous_value": "investigating",
      "new_value": "identified",
      "created_at": "2026-04-20T14:45:00Z"
    }
  ],
  "pagination": {
    "total": 24,
    "page": 1,
    "per_page": 50
  }
}