---
title: Using Test Incidents
description: >-
  Learn how to use test incidents to safely train your team, test automations,
  and validate your incident response process without affecting production data
  or triggering real notifications.
breadcrumbs: >-
  Docs > Incident Response > Incident Management > Incident Management Guides >
  Using Test Incidents
---

# Using Test Incidents

## Overview{% #overview %}

{% image
   source="https://datadog-docs.imgix.net/images/incident_response/incident_management/guides/test_incidents/example_test_incident.6cb354c57557b03df0111b91a3d988e4.png?auto=format"
   alt="Example of a test incident with a purple banner" /%}

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{% #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{% #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{% #enabling-test-incidents %}

{% alert level="danger" %}
Only users with the appropriate Datadog administrative permissions can enable test incidents. After test incidents are enabled, any user with the **Incidents Write** permission can declare them.
{% /alert %}

Test incidents must be enabled before use. To enable:

1. Navigate to [**Incidents** > **Settings** > **Information**](https://app.datadoghq.com/incidents/settings#Information).
1. Scroll to the **Test incidents** section.
1. Toggle the setting to **Enabled**.
1. Click **Save Changes**.

## Declaring a test incident{% #declaring-a-test-incident %}

{% alert level="danger" %}
After test incidents are enabled, any user with the **Incidents Write** permission can declare them.
{% /alert %}

### From the Incidents page{% #from-the-incidents-page %}

1. Navigate to the [Incidents page](https://app.datadoghq.com/incidents).
1. Click the dropdown next to Declare Incident and select **Declare Test Incident**.
1. Fill in the required incident details.
1. (Optional) Configure test incident options to change default behavior.
1. Click **Declare Test Incident**.

### From Slack{% #from-slack %}

If you have the [Slack integration](https://docs.datadoghq.com/integrations/slack/?tab=slackapplicationbeta#using-the-slack-app) configured:

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

## Further reading{% #further-reading %}

- [Configure test incident settings](https://docs.datadoghq.com/incident_response/incident_management/setup_and_configuration/information#test-incidents)
- [Testing incident automations](https://docs.datadoghq.com/incident_response/incident_management/setup_and_configuration/automations#testing-automations)
- [Declare an incident](https://docs.datadoghq.com/incident_response/incident_management/investigate/declare)