Overview

Test incidents are incidents used for training, testing, and validation. They allow your team to practice incident response workflows, validate automations, and onboard new team members without impacting production analytics or triggering real notifications.

Test incidents display a purple banner and are isolated from production incident data.

Default behavior

By default, test incidents:

• Do not appear in search results
• Do not appear in analytics
• Do not execute integrations
• Do not execute notification rules

During declaration, you have the option to enable any of these behaviors if needed for your testing purposes. For example, enable “Execute integrations” when testing workflows, or enable “Include in analytics” when validating reporting.

Use cases

Training and response drills: Use test incidents to onboard responders and simulate realistic scenarios. Practice the full incident lifecycle, test escalation and on-call responsiveness, and evaluate team coordination, without impacting team metrics.

Testing incident automations and notifications rules: Use test incidents to verify that automations and notification rules trigger correctly, execute expected actions (such as sending Slack messages or creating tasks), and can be refined without affecting production workflows.

Validating integrations: Create test incidents to confirm that integrations (such as Jira, ServiceNow, or Slack) create and sync records correctly, propagate updates, and format notifications as expected.

Enabling test incidents

Test incidents must be enabled before use. To enable:

1. Navigate to Incidents > Settings > Information.
2. Scroll to the Test incidents section.
3. Toggle the setting to Enabled.
4. Click Save Changes.

Declaring a test incident

From the Incidents page

1. Navigate to the Incidents page.
2. Click the dropdown next to Declare Incident and select Declare Test Incident.
3. Fill in the required incident details.
4. (Optional) Configure test incident options to change default behavior.
5. Click Declare Test Incident.

From Slack

If you have the Slack integration configured:

1. In any Slack channel, type /datadog incident test.
2. Fill out the incident creation form in Slack.
3. Submit to create the test incident.

Further reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Configure test incident settingsDOCUMENTATION Testing incident automationsDOCUMENTATION Declare an incidentDOCUMENTATION