Incident time machine — what was on the page when it broke

Every Valpero incident gets a time machine view — a one-click way to see what your site looked like at the moment it went DOWN. Useful when:

• You've deployed and something silently broke; the response is 200 OK but the page is blank.
• A customer says "the site was weird at 14:32" and you need a reference frame.
• You're writing a postmortem and want a screenshot to attach.

How it works

When an incident opens we collect two things:

1. Local screenshot. For HTTP monitors, we take a headless-browser snapshot of the page within ~3 seconds of detecting the failure. Stored on our side, accessible from the incident.

2. Wayback Machine snapshot. We query https://archive.org/wayback/available to find the closest archived version of the page near your incident's start time. Sometimes there's one a few minutes away; sometimes the closest is months ago.

Both URLs are surfaced in the incident detail.

Where to find it in the dashboard

1. Open Dashboard → Incidents.
2. Click any incident — the detail panel has a section called Time machine.
3. You'll see two buttons:
4. Local screenshot — opens our snapshot in a new tab.
5. Wayback snapshot — opens the closest web.archive.org capture, with a "X minutes off from incident" hint if it isn't a perfect match.

The screenshot also appears as a thumbnail in the incidents list.

API

If you'd rather pull this programmatically:

GET /api/incidents/{id}/time-machine
Authorization: Bearer <your-jwt>

Returns:

{
  "incident_id": 12345,
  "site_url": "https://example.com",
  "incident_started_at": "2026-04-29T14:32:11Z",
  "local_screenshot_url": "/api/incidents/12345/screenshot",
  "wayback_snapshot": {
    "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260429140000/https://example.com",
    "timestamp": "20260429140000",
    "minutes_offset": 32
  },
  "wayback_browse_url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20260429143211/https://example.com"
}

Why both sources

• Our screenshot is the most accurate — it's exactly what we saw when we marked the site as DOWN. The downside: it's only as good as whatever HTML your server returned at that moment (which can be minimal if the server was already in trouble).

• Wayback has weeks of archive history. Useful for "the site looked fine yesterday and broken today, what changed?" — open the Wayback snapshot from yesterday and compare visually.

Limitations

• Screenshots aren't taken for ping/port/SMTP monitors — only HTTP.
• Wayback may not have a snapshot at all for low-traffic sites. If wayback_snapshot is null, that's why.
• Authenticated pages: we can't see logged-in views. The screenshot shows the page exactly as an anonymous visitor would.

Available on all plans.