Using Custom Fields

This article descibes how to use custom fields when declaring an incident. You can use custom fields to store important metadata about an incident. Enriching your incidents with custom data can improve how you respond to incidents and how you review incidents in reporting and analytics.

Prerequisite

You will need to configure custom fields for your organization.

Declaring incident with custom fields

You are able to declare incidents using custom fields from both the web and Slack. You are also able to use custom fields when creating incidents through integrations like alert routing and Zendesk.

Declaring from the FireHydrant UI

Custom fields that are required will automatically appear on the incident declaration form. Any non-required fields will appear under the Add custom fields section of the form.

Declaring in Slack Advanced modal

All available custom fields will appear on the Slack declaration modal automatically.

Other ways to declare incidents with custom fields

• You can use custom fields when opening incidents through Alert Routing
• If you use our Zendesk integration, your custom fields will appear on the declaration form inside of Zendesk

Editing the value of a custom field

After an incident has been declared, you can edit the value of a custom field in the web UI and Slack. Custom fields preserve their options once an incident is created, so when you edit a field on the incident only options valid at the time it was declared will be available. See About custom field configurations for more information.

To edit a custom field from the web:

1. Go to the incident
2. Locate the custom field you wish to edit in the right sidebar
3. Select the edit icon to open the edit modal

To edit a custom field in Slack you can use

• /fh update
• /fh edit

Searching for an incident with a custom field

You can search for incidents in the FireHydrant UI using data in your custom fields. Because custom fields can change over time, you’ll see both the active and inactive fields that have been used in incidents as well as all the select options that were used in those fields. This allows you to remove custom fields from your current settings but still find historical incidents using previous data.

From the Incidents list in the navigation:

1. Select Add filter button
2. Select the field you want to search on
3. For string fields, enter the string you wish to search for
4. For single- and multi-select fields, select the options you want to search on