Based on the Pagerduty documentation, it seems like “description” field is no longer supported and only the “title” can be retrieved via webhook. These two fields are very different, as one is a quick summary and the other provides scope and context necessary to understand an incident. Is there a workaround to retrieve the description field via webhook? This is normally where we would put a paragraph of additional critical context as such as the Slack thread of a user-reported issue, details about the scope of the issue, etc. Does anyone have any advice on what to do?
Question
Retrieving description of an incident via webhook step in an incident workflow
Hi ​
I asked engineering to take a look at this. I don’t see where that data is surfaced in the API or webhooks.
Hi,
You’re right, in the newer PagerDuty API and workflow integrations, the description field isn’t always directly exposed through webhook payloads, and most examples only include the title. One workaround some teams use is storing the extended context (the paragraph you mentioned, Slack thread links, etc.) in custom fields or incident notes, which can sometimes be retrieved through additional API calls after the webhook is triggered.
Another option is to trigger a follow-up request to the incidents API endpoint using the incident ID from the webhook payload to pull more detailed metadata. That usually provides more context than the basic webhook payload alone.
I came across a similar discussion about handling extended content and references on this page which might also give you some ideas about structuring additional context outside the main webhook payload.
Hope this helps a bit until PagerDuty expands the webhook fields further.
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