Custom Fields on Incidents

The Custom Fields feature allows you to enrich PagerDuty incidents with critical and helpful metadata throughout the incident lifecycle. Flexibly define your preferred data, and standardize what information your incidents display. This feature also allows you to aggregate data from several existing systems and populate that information during incident response.

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Availability

This feature is available with the Business, Enterprise for Incident Management and Digital Operations (Legacy) pricing plans. Please contact Sales to upgrade to a plan with this feature.

Configure Custom Fields

Create a Custom Field

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Required User Permissions

Admins and Account Owners can create, edit and delete fields.

  1. Navigate to Incidents Custom Fields from the top navigation bar.
  2. Click New Custom Field.
  3. Enter the following:
    • Display Name: The name for the field when displayed in incidents.
    • Field Name: This field will automatically populate with the above display name. Refer to this field in the API by the Field Name. The field name can only contain letters, numbers, and underscores.
    • Description: Short description of the information this field displays in incidents.
  4. Next, select the Field Type.
  5. Click Create. Repeat these steps for as many fields as needed.

Edit a Custom Field

  1. Navigate to Incidents Custom Fields.
  2. Click the menu to the right of the field you would like to edit and select Configure.
  3. Edit your preferred details and then click Save.

Delete a Custom Field

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Warning

This action cannot be undone.

  1. Navigate to Incidents Custom Fields.
  2. Click to the right of the field you would like to delete and select Delete Field.
  3. In the confirmation modal, type Delete.
  4. Click Delete again to confirm.

Field Types

You can specify the field data type when you add a Custom Field. Data types help standardize and validate field data, preventing users from entering incorrect data types into a field. There are nine field types:

  • Text
  • Single Select
  • Multiple Select
  • Tag
  • URL
  • Checkbox
  • Datetime
  • Decimal
  • Integer

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Field Restrictions

  • Single Select and Multiple Select field types can have a maximum of 55 options.
  • String values have a maximum of 255 characters.
  • URL values have a maximum of 200 characters. Only absolute URLs are allowed, and they must use one of these schemes: http, https, tel.
  • Datetime values must conform to either full-date or date-time RFC3339, section 5.6. Examples of supported values: 2022-03-14, 2019-08-28T10:43:05Z.

View Custom Fields

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Required User Permissions

Users with permission to view and edit an incident can also view and edit that incident's Custom Fields.

There are two places to view Custom Fields on incidents:

View Custom Fields in the Web App

To view Custom Fields in the web app, navigate to an incident's details page and scroll to the Custom Fields section.

Custom fields in the web app

Custom fields in the web app

Edit Custom Field Values

Custom Fields with default values will be prefilled, but fields may also be empty and intended for the responder to fill out during incident response.

  1. Navigate to an incident's details page and click Edit Fields in the Custom Fields section.
  2. In the right pane, enter your desired value(s) for each Custom Field.
  3. Click Save.

When a responder updates a Custom Field's value, a log entry is added to the incident's timeline.

Custom field in the incident timeline

Custom field in the incident timeline

View Custom Fields in the Mobile App

For incidents with Custom Fields defined, you can view them in the mobile app on an incident's details screen by selecting the Triage tab and scrolling to the section Custom Fields. If there are more than three Custom Fields defined, tap Show More to expand the section and view all Custom Fields.

Custom fields in the mobile app

Custom fields in the mobile app

Sync PagerDuty Custom Fields with ServiceNow Incident Record Fields

Please read our Custom Field Mappings article for more information on bi-directionally syncing PagerDuty Custom Fields with ServiceNow Incident record fields.

Set Custom Field Values with Event Orchestration

Please see our Event Orchestration article for more information.

FAQ

What happens to active incidents if I add or remove a Custom Field?

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Custom Fields are applied across all incidents on an account. This means that if you create a new Custom Field, that field will appear on all incidents previously created on your account. Similarly, if you delete a Custom Field, it will no longer appear on incidents on your account.

When adding a new field, default values will not be applied to previously created incidents — those incidents will have null values.

How many Custom Fields can I create?

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Customers with a Business pricing plan can create up to 15 active Custom Fields on incidents. Customers with an Enterprise for Incident Management plan can create an additional 15 Custom Fields, for a total of 30.

Please contact our Sales team if you'd like to upgrade to a plan that offers more Custom Fields.