Rootly and Cortex — the most comprehensive incident management solution available

Industry analysts like Forrester have continuously reported on the quantitative benefits of Internal Developer Portals (IDPs), such as an average of 20% improved developer productivity thanks to reduced “time-to-find” and accelerated deployment of new services. Cortex is the leading IDP in the market, trusted by Tripadvisor, Affirm, Kraken Flex, Grammarly, and many other high-performing engineering teams.

Rootly, the AI-native on-call and incident response platform trusted by Grammarly, LinkedIn, NVIDIA, Replit, Kraken Flex, and thousands of SRE teams around the globe, is joining forces with Cortex to deliver a new standard for incident management.

Instead of digging through Confluence to find an outdated UML diagram of the service experiencing an issue or desperately pinging people to find someone who can answer questions about it, a responder can access Cortex through Rootly and get instant access to the service dependency map, owner contact details, documentation, and a list of recent deployments.

Similarly, developers won’t have to ask, “Is XYZ staging down, or is it something in my code?” because Cortex highlights ongoing incidents from Rootly directly within the Developer Portal. Thanks to Rootly, developers can also find information about their on-call rotations from Rootly in Slack or MS Teams.

Rootly together with Cortex opens up new possibilities for developers and SREs that were not possible before. With a unified toolset that combines incident response and the benefits of a developer portal, incidents can be managed with richer context available from the Cortex catalog. On the other hand, developers also benefit from gaining visibility into incidents happening at their organization across different environments.

Cortex and Rootly: Bootstrapping investigations for SREs

Earlier this year, Google SREs published a paper on how they’re changing the way they approach reliability. Instead of over-focusing on metrics, including SLOs, Google is prioritizing system model visibility. Through its comprehensive catalogs, Cortex offers visibility into the system’s model as it ties together services, dependencies, ownership, and documentation.

So far, this visibility in Cortex has helped developers and platform engineers make informed decisions on how to build or extend their services. With the introduction of Rootly together with Cortex, this level of visibility enables responders to quickly make sense of an incident as it unfolds.

Now, a responder can acknowledge an alert with Rootly over Slack and MS Teams, start an incident, and jump into the associated Cortex service entry. Once in Cortex, the responder will have access to a single pane of glass where the service’s dependencies, latest deployments, documentation, and owner are outlined.

From there, the responder can keep digging with the help of Rootly AI until they determine the root cause and establish a course of action to resolve the incident.

Improving Incident Visibility for Developers

Developers deal with dozens of tools every day to get their job done. You can’t expect them to also remember URLs buried somewhere in your intranet for internal status pages on staging, QA, and production environments.

Rootly already brings incident updates to Slack and MS Teams, which means developers can find the latest news about ongoing incidents in their collaboration tool. They can also declare an incident with a chat command without having to go to a dedicated tool.

Now, with Rootly and Cortex, you can take incident visibility to new heights and meet developers where they are. The new integration includes a highlight to let developers know about ongoing incidents in their Developer Portal.

Developers also get a Rootly Catalog in Cortex as part of this integration, where they can get an overview of the incidents happening across services.

Proactive Reliability and Engineering Excellence

Reliability goes beyond putting a bandaid on a system. The goal most teams set for themselves isn’t just to prevent a repeat incident but to prevent an entire category of incidents from happening again. This is only possible through consistent post-incident reviews, which Rootly facilitates by providing AI-based incident analysis and suggesting follow-up actions.

To track these efforts at scale, you can use Cortex Scorecards. Beyond keeping track of basic data like MTTR, Scorecards can leverage Rootly’s metrics and data to highlight whether teams are meeting their post-incident review quotas and following through on the action items that emerge from each incident.

Rootly together with Cortex: a new standard in incident response

By bridging the gap between incident response and the service catalog, Rootly together with Cortex  speeds up resolution processes, improves developers' visibility into incidents, and helps the organization move toward greater maturity.

To get started check out the integration documentation or if you want to know more request a demo from one of our reliability advocates.