Configuring Custom Fields

Having exactly the right information you need to respond to incidents is critical to responding faster, and some of the most important information is unique to your organization. Custom fields allow you to enrich your incident with critical system and business information so your team can respond better.

About custom field configurations

Your custom field setup needs to be able to evolve over time as your requirements change. But changing your configuration for today should not impact past incidents. Custom fields are designed to preserve their settings when the incident is created.

So if you add/remove a custom field, change the name of a field, or change the valid options for a field, an incident created before those changes will only have the options from the time of its creation. You will be able to edit that incident and select valid options from that time. You will not see the new options in an existing incident. At this time, we do not allow you to update an existing incident to the new custom field configuration.

Note: Setting up and modifying custom fields requires Owner permissions within your organization. Accounts are currently limited to 10 custom fields.

Creating a new custom field

In the FireHydrant UI navigation, select Settings and then Incident settings. Under the Incident Fields table, select Add custom field.

In the custom field modal, you’ll have the following fields:

1. Display name (required): the name as it will appear on forms and in the UI. The display name must be unique across the currently configured custom fields. The display name will be slugified automatically so you can reference it in liquid templates.
2. Help text: description for completing the field that appears in tooltips in the web and Slack
3. Type (required): the type of value for the field which can be one of the following: String, Single-select, Multi-select. Single- and multi-select fields require at least one option, and you are able to change the order in which the options are displayed.
4. Required at declaration: Sets if the custom field will be required at incident declaration and thereafter.

All incidents created after a custom field is added will have the field available in Slack and web UI. Previously created incidents will not show the custom field.

Custom fields will appear automatically on the web UI incident declaration form and in the Slack Advanced declaration form. You are not able to customize if custom fields appear or their order on the Slack Advanced modal at this time.

Editing a custom field

In the FireHydrant UI navigation, select Settings and then Incident settings. In the table of incident fields, find the custom field you wish to edit and select the Edit icon.

You will be able to modify the display name, help text, and requirement settings for all fields, for single- and multi-select fields you will also be able to modify the options available in those fields. You cannot convert the field to a different type (e.g., string to single-select).

Removing a custom field

In the FireHydrant UI navigation, select Settings and then Incident settings. In the table of incident fields, find the custom field you wish to edit and select the Delete icon.

Removing a custom field from your configuration will only remove it from being used on future incidents. Any existing incidents with the custom field will continue to have that field available to edit the value and used in searches. You will not be able to undo the removal of the field, to add the field back you will need to create a new field.

Using custom fields in liquid templates

Custom fields can be referenced anywhere liquid template variables are supported. Under Settings > Incident settings, you will find the Incident Fields table including your custom fields and their corresponding slug used to reference them in templates.

You can reference the value of a custom field directly like the example below. If you reference a slug that does not exist, you will receive a string value of <unknown value>.

{{ incident.custom_fields.field_slug.value }}

You can use Liquid’s powerful control flow and iteration tags to output exactly what you need. To iterate through all of your custom fields, you can use:

{% for field in incident.custom_fields %}
  {{ field.name }}
  {{ field.value }}
{% endfor %}

Next Steps

Now that you've configured your custom fields, you can:

• Declare incidents with custom fields.
• Use custom fields in liquid templates in Runbooks and Alert Routing