💓 Heartbeats: Continuous System Monitoring

Not all incidents start with immediate, visible impact that makes them easy to detect. Sometimes, issues can spring up quietly, undetected by your monitoring systems until they cause downstream impact. You probably already have alerts set up to notify you when something goes obviously wrong, but with Rootly, now you can get quiet confirmation that your systems are behaving correctly using heartbeats, giving you peace of mind that hidden problems aren’t going undetected and waiting to cause unexpected impact.

Heartbeats are periodic signals sent by your systems or applications to indicate they are functioning properly. When you set up heartbeats in Rootly, we’ll ping your services at a selected interval to ensure they’re functioning as intended. If a ping is not detected, Rootly will automatically page the escalation policy, team, individual, or service of your choice, notifying them that the heartbeat has “expired” so they can investigate right away. You can specify how frequent of an interval you’d like to ping, and the urgency level of the alert if a ping is missed.

You might wonder: “if something goes down, am I going to start getting paged every two minutes?”. Not to worry — to avoid excessive noise, you won’t be paged for all missed intervals of the heartbeat, just the first one. For example, if you have a service with a heartbeat interval of 2 minutes, and a heartbeat ping is not received by the service, that heartbeat will be considered “expired” and an alert will be created, paging the target responder. Once the heartbeat is recovered, it will move to an “active” state and the alert will be resolved.

With heartbeats, you can:

🧩 Ensure your critical integrations are connected to Rootly and functioning as intended

🕵️ Detect issues in third party systems that might have been missed by your observability dashboards

🛟 Add an extra layer of monitoring for critical systems by selecting a shorter ping interval and high alert urgency 

Customers are using and loving heartbeats already! If you haven’t started using heartbeats, head to On-Call from Rootly web and select Heartbeats, then + New Heartbeat. It’s easy to create your heartbeat using our guided in-app setup process. You can also find full setup instructions, including a video walkthrough, in our Help Docs.

🌝 New & Improved

🆕 External link to the incoming alert can now be extracted and stored as a native alert field in Rootly.

🆕 Motion is now a native integration in the Rootly Integrations Catalog.

🆕 Introduce two new Slack commands to quickly pull up all tasks (/rootly all tasks) and follow-ups (/rootly all followups).

💅 Cleaned up display of alerts on Rootly mobile app for better alignment of timestamps.

💅 Updated EscalationPolicy API to allow teams and services payload.

🐛 Fixed intermittent error seen when attempting to integrate with Zoom.

🐛 Removed duplicate display of Sources filter in Audit Log page.