Custom Incident Statuses let your organization define status labels that match your team's workflow — while preserving the system categories that power dashboards, AI inference, and reporting.
By default, every incident moves through five base categories: Open, Acknowledged, Blocked, Observation, and Resolved. These categories drive dashboard columns, AI behavior, and analytics.
With Custom Incident Statuses, you can create your own named statuses — such as Waiting on Vendor, Root Cause Identified, or Deploying Fix — and map each one to a base category. The system treats your custom status as the display label while using the underlying category for all automated behavior.
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Example: You create a status called Deploying Fix and assign it to the Observation category. On the dashboard, responders see "Deploying Fix" as the badge — but the system knows it belongs to the Observation column for grouping and AI inference.
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Every custom status maps to exactly one of the five base categories:
| Category | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Open | The incident is declared but no one has started working on it. |
| Acknowledged | A responder has taken ownership and begun investigating. |
| Blocked | Progress depends on an external party; nothing the team can do until they respond. |
| Observation | A fix has been applied and the team is monitoring for stability. |
| Resolved | The incident is fully addressed and the system is confirmed stable. |
You can define multiple custom statuses per category. For example, the Blocked category might have both Waiting on Vendor and Pending Change Approval.
When custom statuses are defined for your organization, Vibe AI is aware of them and will reference your specific status labels when analyzing incident progress.
Vibe AI continuously monitors incident conversations and infers the most appropriate custom status based on context. For example, if a responder says "We've submitted a ticket to AWS and are waiting for their response", Vibe AI may infer that the incident is in the Waiting on Vendor status (under the Blocked category).
Vibe AI's status inference operates on a separate lane from human-set statuses: