---
title: "Acknowledging Incidents — Lemwatch Help"
description: "Click Acknowledge on an incident to stop escalation, claim ownership, and let teammates know you are on it."
canonical: "https://lemwatch.com/help/acknowledging-incidents"
source: "https://lemwatch.com"
---

# Acknowledging Incidents

> Click Acknowledge on an incident to stop escalation, claim ownership, and let teammates know you are on it.

## Acknowledging Incidents

 When an incident fires, LemWatch shows it in the **Incidents** queue with an **Acknowledge** button. Clicking it:

- Marks the incident acknowledged with your name and a timestamp

- Stops any further escalation steps from firing

- Lets the rest of the team see somebody is already working it

- Skips this incident in future escalation sweeps, so the engine doesn't waste cycles on it

### Why this matters now

 The notification engine now filters out incidents where acknowledged_at is set **at query time**. Before, an acked incident still loaded its policy, steps, and prior fires on every sweep — that N+1 work is gone. The practical effect: ack one-click silences the whole policy.

### Re-opening

 If you ack by mistake or the issue comes back:

- Open the incident

- Click Reopen (or clear the ack via the keyboard shortcut r )

- Escalation resumes from the next step in the policy

### Best practices

- Ack as soon as you start investigating — don't wait until you've fixed it

- Use handoff to pass to the next on-call (see Incident handoffs )

- Add a comment so the next person sees what you've already tried

- Resolve the incident when the underlying issue is fixed; ack alone doesn't close it


## Related

- [Help centre](https://lemwatch.com/help)
- [Incident Management Workflow](https://lemwatch.com/help/incident-management-workflow)
- [Escalation Policies](https://lemwatch.com/help/escalation-policies)
- [Incident Handoffs](https://lemwatch.com/help/incident-handoffs)
- [Set up visual monitoring for a page](https://lemwatch.com/help/visual-monitoring-setup)
- [Visual diff thresholds explained](https://lemwatch.com/help/visual-diff-thresholds)
- [Lemwatch pricing](https://lemwatch.com/pricing)
- [Activity Log](https://lemwatch.com/help/activity-log)