Organize your monitors using Metadata
Metadata lets you add custom information to any monitor in StatusGator. It provides a flexible way to organize your monitors and attach additional context that can be used by your team or passed to other systems through integrations.
For example, you might use metadata to identify the department, team, application owner, or environment associated with a monitor.
Accessing metadata
Metadata is configured individually for each monitor.
To add or edit metadata:
- Open the monitor you want to update.
- Go to Monitor Settings.
- Select the General tab.
- Find the Metadata section.
- Add the metadata you want to associate with the monitor.
- Save your changes.
You can return to the General tab at any time to update or remove metadata.
What is metadata?
Metadata is additional information you associate with a monitor.
Think of it as a way to describe a monitor using information that is specific to your organization. You can add details such as:
- Department: Marketing
- Team: Growth
- Application owner: Jane Smith
- Environment: Production
- Region: North America
- Internal application ID: APP-1234
The metadata you add is entirely up to you. It can represent any information that helps your organization categorize, identify, or work with a monitor.
Why use metadata?
Organize monitors using your own structure
Every organization categorizes its applications, systems, and infrastructure differently. Metadata lets you add the information that matters to your organization directly to your monitors.
For example, you can use metadata to record which team owns a monitor, whether it belongs to a production or staging environment, or which internal application it relates to.
Add context to integrations and automation
Metadata is especially useful when StatusGator sends monitor information to another system, such as through a webhook.
Along with the monitor and incident details, metadata can provide organization-specific context that the receiving system can use in its own workflows.
For example, suppose a monitor has:
Department: Marketing
Environment: Production
Application owner: Jane Smith
When an incident occurs, you could send this information through a webhook to your internal incident management system. That system could use the metadata to route the incident to the Marketing team, recognize that it affects production, and notify the appropriate application owner.
Other ways you could use metadata downstream include:
- Routing alerts or incidents to the right team
- Populating custom fields in another system
- Triggering workflows based on department, environment, ownership, or other values
- Including additional context in notifications
- Grouping or reporting on monitors using your organization's own categories
In other words, metadata lets you attach information that is meaningful to your organization and make that information available wherever your StatusGator data is used.
Choosing metadata
There is no required structure for metadata. Choose fields based on the information that is useful to your team or to systems that consume StatusGator data.
| Metadata | Example |
|---|---|
| Department | Marketing |
| Team | Growth Engineering |
| Application owner | Jane Smith |
| Business unit | Enterprise |
| Environment | Production |
| Region | North America |
| Cost center | CC-1042 |
| Internal application ID | APP-1234 |
A good rule of thumb is to add metadata for information you may need when identifying, routing, or responding to an issue involving a monitor.
Getting started
Open the monitor you want to configure and go to Monitor Settings → General → Metadata.
Start with information your organization already uses to categorize systems or determine ownership. Department, Team, Application owner, and Environment are common starting points, but you can define metadata based on your own workflows and integrations.