It can be useful to automatically set custom fields to reduce the mental overhead for your responders.

1. Speed up responders

Using Catalog, it's possible to 'guess' what the right value is for a custom field. For example, if the affected service is Data Pipeline, the affected team is probably Data. The Catalog can figure this out for you, without the responder having to fill in yet another dropdown during the incident.

2. Improve reporting

If you're a larger org, you might have hundreds of teams. When it comes to reporting and insights, it's often useful to cut the data in a less granular way: perhaps by Division or Function.

To enable this, you can create another custom field Affected Functions and use the Catalog to automatically set this based on the Affected Teams field that the responder has set above.

You would never even need to show this field to a responder, but it would then be available for you to slice and dice data going forwards.

When creating a Custom Field, select Automated, and then Add an expression.

Then, use the Expression Builder to navigate through your Catalog to automatically derive a Custom Field based on the value of another Custom Field.

You can also decide whether users are able to override the value of the custom field. For our Affected teams use-case, we probably do want users to be able to choose another value - this is more of a 'sensible default'.

However, for our Affected functions use-case (i.e. for reporting) there's no need: there's always a consistent relationship between team and function.