Overview

On the Work Management page, work items can be sorted by creation date, status, or priority. By default, work items are sorted by creation date. Toggle between List view and Board view: The List view provides a detailed table, and the Board view offers a Kanban board with drag-and-drop functionality.

To make bulk edits to work items within a project, use the checkboxes to select one or more work items. Then, use the drop-down menus to perform actions in bulk, such as status management, assignment, and archiving. When work items are moved to a different project, they are assigned a new work item ID. The old work item URL does not redirect to the new work item.

Keyboard shortcuts

Use the following keyboard shortcuts for swift navigation:

Search work items

Within a project, you can search for work items by:

• attribute key-value pairs: For example, to find all work items created from Event Correlation patterns, search for creation_source:Event Management. For work items created from individual events, search for creation_source:Event.
• title: Surround your search term with double quotes. For example, to find all of your work items containing the term “kubernetes pods” in the title, search for "kubernetes pods."

To compose a more complex query, you can use the following case sensitive Boolean operators: AND, OR, and - (exclusion). For example, priority:(P2 OR P3) returns work items of either priority P2 or P3.

Additionally, you can search for work items across all projects using the search bar in the top left corner.

Create a view

A view is a saved query filter that allows you to scope a list of work items down to what’s most relevant to you. Projects have default views for each of the statuses: open, in progress, closed, and archived. In addition, there are default views for work items assigned to you and created by you.

To create a custom view:

1. Select Add View from within a project.
2. Give the view a name.
3. In the search box, enter a query. The preview refreshes to show you the work items that match the current search query.
4. (Optional) Send a notification with third-party tools such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, or Webhooks. Click + Add Recipient Type and select from the pre-configured channels or recipients. See Create notifications and tickets to learn more about the available tools and options.
5. Click Save view.

Work item details

The Work Item Details page acts as the single source of truth on what is going on with the investigation. Each work item has the following properties:

Status

All work items default to open upon creation. As you progress through the work item, you can change it to in progress and closed. Type S to change the status of a work item.

Priority

By default, a priority is not defined. You can set the priority of the work item to P1 - Critical, P2 - High, P3 - Medium, P4 - Low, P5 - Info. Type P to set the priority of a work item.

Assignee

Unassigned by default. To assign it to a user, type A. To assign it to yourself, type I.

Attributes

Adding attributes allow for organization and filtering. By default, all work items have the following attributes: team, datacenters, services, environments, and versions.

Archiving

Archiving a work item removes it from searches. Type E to archive a work item.

Activity timeline

Each work item automatically creates an activity timeline to capture real-time updates to status, assignee, priority, signals, and any comments added. If you’re tagged in a comment, you receive an email. Type M to add a comment and Cmd + Enter to submit it.

Take action

Use Work Management to gather information, context, and resources to determine the proper action to take. This includes further investigation, escalating to an incident, or closing out a work item.

From an individual work item:

• Create an investigative notebook: Gather investigation information and collaborate with your team members.
• Declare an incident: Escalate a work item to an incident and kick off your incident response process.
• Manually create a Jira issue: Use Shift + J to create a Jira issue. For more information on how to configure automatic Jira issue creation and bidirectional synchronization, see the Settings documentation.
• Manually create a ServiceNow incident: Use Shift + N to create a ServiceNow incident.
• Close out the work item: Let the team know that no further action is needed. Update the status of the work item to closed.
• Request approval: Request sign-off from one or more team members before taking action on a work item.

Work Management Analytics

Work Management Analytics is a queryable data source for aggregated work item statistics. You can query these analytics in a variety of graph widgets in both Dashboards and Notebooks to analyze team productivity and identify patterns in issues.

The following widgets support Work Management Analytics: timeseries, top list, query value, table, tree map, pie chart, change, and list.

Export

You can export work items directly from a work item details page:

1. From an individual work item, click the More Options icon at the top right of a work item details page.
2. Select Export to PDF.
3. In the print dialog that appears, choose Save as PDF as your destination.
4. Click Save to complete the export.

Further Reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Work Management settingsDOCUMENTATION How we centralize and remediate risks with Datadog Case ManagementBLOG Centralize human and agentic work with Datadog Work ManagementBLOG