Property Fields

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Overview

Custom property fields enable you to capture important attributes unique to your organization, such as specific product models in the automotive industry or unique codes in a software deployment. These attributes help you efficiently categorize incidents.

Incident details page

Property fields are organized into three tables that correspond to where the fields appear in the Overview tab of the Incident Details page:

What Happened
Why It Happened
Attributes

You can move any property field into a different table or reorder them in the same table by dragging and dropping the field using the drag handle icon. Preview what your property fields look like by clicking the Preview button on the top right.

Fields

Property fields are key pieces of metadata you can tag your incidents with. This makes it easier to search for specific subsets of incidents on the Homepage and make more robust queries in Incident Management Analytics. There are five default fields:

Fields	Description
Detection Method	Add context on how this incident was declared.
Summary	Provide details on what happened to cause this incident.
Root Cause	List possible root causes or areas for investigation.
Services	If you have Datadog APM configured, the `Services` property field automatically uses your APM Service names. To edit the values of `Services`, upload a CSV of the values you wish to associate with each field. Your CSV file must start with your field’s name in the top row, with the desired values listed immediately below it.
Teams	The `Teams` property field automatically populates from the teams defined in your organization.

You can add more property fields to your settings by selecting one of your existing key:value pair metric tags. When you do this, the key of your property field is the start case of your metric tag’s key (for example, the tag scope_name becomes field Scope Name) and the values for the property field are equal to the values reported by the metric tag.

Field types

In addition to the five default fields and the fields based on metric tags, you can also create custom property fields and mark them as required at the creation of an incident. There are four kinds of custom fields you can create:

Single-Select: A dropdown field that can only have one value assigned at a time per incident. Values can be predefined in-line from the UI or by uploading values through a CSV file.
Multi-Select: A dropdown field that can have multiple values assigned per incident. Values can be predefined in-line from the UI or by uploading values through a CSV file.
Text Area: A free-form text box. Values are entered by a responder on a per-incident basis.
Number: A text area that only accepts digits and a single period as input. Values are entered by a responder on a per-incident basis.

Single-Select, Multi-Select, and Number custom fields are searchable facets in the Incident Homepage and Incident Management Analytics for easy filtering of incidents. Number fields are measures in Incident Management Analytics that can be graphed and visualized in Dashboards and Notebooks.