Merging Incidents

The Incident Merge feature allows users to merge multiple incidents that may be related to a single event or occurence into one single incident. The user chooses an incident as the parent incident and other incidents to be merged as child incidents. This functionality is especially useful when:

• Multiple alert sources are firing alerts creating incidents about the same issue.
• Co-dependent, or co-related incidents are formed across services or teams.

To merge incidents, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Zenduty Incident Dashboard. On the top-right, click on the merge incidents button.
   

2. In the wizard that pops up, select a parent incident that you want to merge child incidents into.
   

3. Now, select the child incidents.
   

4. Your incidents have been merged, you can access their co-related details in the new merged incident page.
   

Merging Incidents: Behaviour

• Once incidents are merged, the timelines of all incidents will have an action added. Notifications for child incidents will not be sent further and all incidents will now be Acknowledged.
• Incidents can be unmerged as well, once unmerged - all incidents will continue their function as expected independently.
• If a parent Incident A gets attached to Incident B as a child incident, Incident A and its child incidents will all become child incidents of Incident B.
• Stakeholders of both child incidents and parent incidents will be shown under stakeholders of the final parent incident. Any communication about parent incidents will also be sent to stakeholders of child incidents.
• Under Analytics, child incidents will be included by default like MTTA & MTTR. You can choose to include or exclude child incidents from the Analytics Dashboard.
• Both incidents can function in the other aspects independently. A child can be resolved irrespective of the parent incident's status. If the child incident is resolved and the parent incident is still unresolved, Zenduty will create a new incident if the same alerts that triggered the child incident are received again and won't merge it with the original parent incident by default.
  Once the parent incident gets resolved, the child incidents will be automatically resolved. If incidents are merged with a resolved parent incident, then the all child incidents will get resolved.
• SLA & Ack timeout notifications for child incidents will be stopped once merged.
• The parent incident assignee will get notified by email when incidents get merged with their incident.

Permissions Required

1. Intra-team Incident Merge: By default, users can merge incidents within their own team.
2. Inter-team Incident Merge: To merge incidents across teams, Incident Write Team Level permission must be granted by the teams of both child incidents and the parent incident.
3. Account-level Write Permission: Even users with the Incident Write Account Level permission cannot merge incidents if the respective teams have not enabled the incident write permission.
4. Account owners and Administrators cannot merge incidents unless they are part of the team the incidents belongs to.
5. To view the child incidents, the user must have incident read permission, either from the account or team level.