Using the Catalog

Introducing Catalog

The Catalog is a connected map of “everything” that exists in your organization that you can easily navigate and is available across features like Workflows, Insights, and Triggers to level up your incident response.

Getting started with Catalog

The best place to get started is by following this hands-on lab session on YouTube.

Integrating with an existing Service Catalog

Already using a Service Catalog? No problem! We support a number of Integrations.

What can I do with Catalog?

Many things! Including, but not limited to:

• Populating Custom Fields with Catalog data
• Automatic Custom Fields
• Using the Catalog in Workflows
• Powering your Status Page Sub-pages

Populating Custom Fields with Catalog data

Fed up with manually maintaining options for custom fields? When configuring custom fields, select “From a catalog type” as an option for how the field should be managed. This means that any updates made to a Catalog type will be updated in this custom field.

If you want to migrate an existing custom field to be managed from a Catalog type, go to the existing custom field that you would like to migrate and follow the migration wizard.

Automatic Custom Fields

Want to update the value of a custom field based on the value of another custom field? For example, when selecting the Affected Service, using the Catalog you could derive the Affected Team without having an Incident Responder select anything.

When creating a custom field, select Set automatically. This replaces the Field type selector with an Add an expression button: you no longer pick a type, because the expression’s return type decides it.

Click Add an expression, then choose Query on the Create expression chooser. (The other option, If… else…, returns a value that changes based on conditions.)

This only works for fields backed by a Catalog type. On a custom field whose options you type in by hand, the expression checkbox is disabled, because there is no Catalog to navigate from.

Then, use the Expression Builder to navigate through your Catalog to automatically derive a custom field based on the value of another custom field. Use What should be used if the query returns nothing? to set the value to fall back to when the query comes back empty. Whether you have to fill it in depends on the expression: some refuse to save without a fallback, and tell you so when you try. To check your work as you build, choose sample values and we’ll preview what the expression returns.

Using the Catalog in Workflows

Once you’ve set up custom fields for the relevant Catalog types, you can use those custom fields in Workflows. For example:

• Escalate incidents to the right on-call engineers when certain business functionality is impacted.
• Invite Customer Success Managers to incidents when their customers are mentioned.
• Notify the executive team when an aggregate amount of revenue across impacted customers crosses a threshold.

Powering your Status Page sub-pages

Sub-pages are part of our status page offering, and allow you to create a page that is specific to different services, systems, products, or regions. In short, if you operate across multiple countries (UK, US, France), you can have one status page per region.

Catalog supercharges sub-pages by allowing you to associate components/services/systems with regions. For instance, you can say that the API is only used in the UK and France, whilst the Website is used in all regions. This means when you author an update, we can automatically route that update to the relevant sub-pages.

To find out more about setting up sub-pages, visit this helpful article.

Visualize with Catalog Graph

Use the Catalog Graph to visualize how different catalog entries connect to each other. You can build up a graph from any catalog entry, and share the URL so colleagues see the same view.