Enhancing Service Reliability: Uniting Rootly’s Incident Management and Backstage’s Software Catalog

Uniting Rootly’s Incident Management and Backstage’s Software Catalog

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, ensuring the reliability of services is paramount for businesses aiming to deliver seamless user experiences. However, as the complexity of companies' environments grows, ensuring your services, infrastructure and applications are reliable and resilient to failure is challenging.  It’s naive to think all services and infrastructure are operating 100% as designed.  As a result, many organizations have implemented Site Reliability Engineering practices which help deliver on the customer promise of reliable applications and experiences. Common starting points are to observe your environments and define SLO to determine which components are healthy.  Additionally, organizations rely on service catalogs, such as the Software Catalog within Backstage, to have a clear understanding and view of all microservices currently deployed.  Despite our best efforts to design reliable systems, proactively test them, or monitor them in real time, incidents and outages are a common thorn in companies’ side.

Today, we’re happy to announce that Rootly is now live and supported in the Spotify for Backstage Marketplace.  Additionally, Rootly integrates natively into Backstage to create a powerful integration that empowers development and incident response teams to enhance service reliability. In this blog post, we'll delve into the key benefits of integrating Rootly and Backstage and why enterprises should prioritize service reliability.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Rootly to the Spotify Marketplace for Backstage! We hope our Backstage adopters take advantage of Rootly’s plugin to enhance their service reliability.” - Backstage Team  

Comprehensive Incident Management with Rootly

Rootly provides a centralized platform for end-to-end incident management. From incident detection to resolution, Rootly streamlines the entire process, ensuring quick response times and minimal service disruptions. Integration with Backstage allows teams to seamlessly manage incidents within the context of the broader service landscape.

Efficient Collaboration and Communication

Rootly facilitates effective collaboration among cross-functional teams during incident response. By integrating with Backstage, development and operations teams gain visibility into the service catalog, enabling them to understand dependencies and communicate efficiently. This ensures a coordinated effort in resolving incidents swiftly and improving on MTTX metrics.

Unified Software Catalog with Backstage

Among many functions, Backstage offers a comprehensive Software Catalog, offering a centralized repository for all services, tools, and documentation. Integration with Rootly enriches the catalog with real-time incident data, allowing teams to assess the health of services and make informed decisions. This unified view enhances overall operational awareness.

Enhanced Monitoring and Visibility

Rootly’s integration with Backstage provides enhanced monitoring capabilities by overlaying incident data onto the software catalog. This visual representation allows teams to quickly identify potential issues, monitor service health, and proactively address concerns before they escalate.

Automated Incident Response

Rootly's automation capabilities, when combined with Backstage's software catalog, enable intelligent incident response. Automated workflows and playbooks can be triggered based on the type of incident and its impact on specific services, allowing for quicker resolution and minimizing manual intervention.

Service Reliability Metrics and Reporting

The integration of Rootly and Backstage facilitates the generation of service reliability metrics and reports. Enterprises can gain insights into incident trends, resolution times, and overall service health. This data-driven approach empowers organizations to make informed decisions for continuous improvement.

Interested in connecting your Rootly account and Backstage? Follow the instructions here. Not a Rootly user yet? Check it out with a free 14 day trial, no credit card required.

About the Author

Kyle McMeekin is Head of Channels at Rootly. He has spent the last 9 years working in the DevOps space. He started his career leading the Solutions Engineering team at QASymphony (acquired by Tricentis). He then drove cloud alliances with AWS, MSFT and Google before he went on to build net new partnership programs at Kobiton, Gremlin, and now, Rootly. He's worked with global enterprises and their partners to help streamline their Incident Management processes.