Customize Subject line for Alert Emails

Currently when an alert is triggered the email, regardless of the alert, has the subject line of “[PagerDuty Alert] You have 1 triggered incident.”

This should be customizable to include things like Ticket Number, Reporter, Assignee, Subject of the Ticket.

Not being able to customize these subject lines means that Pager Duty is just noise in the inbox. This should be customizable based on the workflow and whatever available information is present. I’ve seen this topic brought up before, but it was closed before I had a chance to comment on it. The question was asked “What would you like to customize it to” to which my answer would have been “Something important and relevant to my company”.

“[PagerDuty Alert] You have 1 triggered incident.” is not a useful or relevant subject line, but each company will have their own best-case for what is included (hence the request for customization). We would include a ticket number, severity (PD triggers on a Sev1 or 2 for us and knowing the difference quickly is important) and subject of the ticket if possible, but I imagine many use-cases would arise where different customizations would be wanted.

As it stands, in order to differentiate between the two, I have 2 identical webhooks and workflows set up responding to either a Sev1 or a Sev2 and then flowing down identical parallel pipelines so that I can attain the end result of the name of the Service or Escalation Policy being either “Severity 1” or “Severity 2” and thats a silly way to have to track what severity a ticket is.

Its also annoying that I can’t seem to include a hyperlink within the email that will carry the user to the ticket rather than to the PagerDuty Incident. We honestly couldn’t care less about the PD incident once its been created - We need to get into our ticketing system and to the ticket ASAP. This may be a shortcoming in JIRA and as I switch to Ivanti I’ll look to see if its a capability i’m not seeing BUT it doesn’t seem that theres anywhere within PD to inject that info into the body if it was being passed by the ticketing system in the first place

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Hi David,

Sorry to keep you waiting! Thanks for sharing all of this great feedback. I personally haven’t encountered these requests before, but I can see their value. I’ve noted these topics and they’ll be in consideration as we continue to iterate.

Thank you again for writing!

Cheers,

Victor
Product Manager

Adding my vote here. Would love to be able to customize the whole email but the subject is a good start.

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This kind of request raised earlier too and you can find it here:

/forum/t/pagerduty-email-incidents-triggered-notification-subject/1456

Count us in on this too. We really need to add a prefix, external account number, or even something more useful to the subject line.

Our use case:

We use a human third-party answering service to take our calls and send us email alerts for emergencies. We direct those emergency items to our PD email integration and created a PD user that ultimately forwards them back the alert so they know we got it. They had asked us if we could include our account number in the response back so they could associate the alert with their incident and keep everything neatly in one place. Sadly, we told them we were not able to and it’s added complexity to the process.

Agree with everyone here that the current subject line doesn’t appear helpful and is a wasted opportunity to provide some sort of actionable information.

+1

I really want to have this kind of feature.

In my case, I’d like to make subject to be composed of “original email’s subject” and “severity”

This is basic functionality which is most definitely required ASAP.

This has been a feature request at least 4 years go … is no one reading the forum or gives a crap about such a easy and would be great to have feature request?

Is this request possible? There could be value is being able to edit the Body of the message as well