Today we're releasing custom fields, a powerful new feature that empowers you to tailor FireHydrant to your organization's specific needs and capture essential incident details. Custom fields help you track critical states, involved parties, resolution specifics, affected services, messages, and more — almost anything you want! — all aligned with your unique workflows. Regardless of the size of your team or the maturity of your processes, custom fields adapt to your workflow.

In the fast-paced high-tech industry, efficient incident management is a critical factor in maintaining brand reputation, employee morale, and most importantly, your bottom line. Good practices can result in reduced downtime, increased learning opportunities from incidents, and an enhanced reputation among both the engineering community and customers. But quantifying the true cost of incidents has always been a challenge — until now.

I firmly believe in never letting a good incident go to waste. Incidents expose weak spots and create opportunities for medium and long-term investments. In analyzing incidents and understanding their root causes, organizations can identify areas that require additional resources or enhancements. When incidents are used to align your platform and product engineering, it opens up opportunities to enhance the performance and security of your product.

Defined severity levels quickly get responders and stakeholders on the same page on the impact of the incident, and they set expectations for the level of response effort — both of which help you fix the problem faster. But sometimes, for whatever reason, a severity level just doesn’t get set. Maybe there’s confusion around what severity level to use. Or maybe you have a low barrier to declaration and your responders just need a little nudge.