About Lucidworks

Lucidworks is a leading search solutions provider that powers commerce, customer service, and workplace applications. They’re a remote-first company with a distributed team of over 300 employees serving hundreds of thousands of users at some of the world’s biggest brands.

Why Incident Management?

As a remote-first company, we rely heavily on our digital collaboration tools. We pretty much live in Slack, so we want to make the most of that platform wherever we can. We’ve been through a bit of a journey with our incident response tooling. Early on, we built our own tool that did a bit of automation, like creating an incident Slack channel and adding folks to it, and a bit of integration with PagerDuty. At the time, we didn’t realize the full scope of possibility and that there were companies like Rootly out there dedicated to this space.

What really pushed us to look at investing in a tool was that the tool we built just wasn’t reliable. Sometimes it would glitch or crash. The last thing we want is to train people to rely on tools that are unstable, so we knew we needed a better long-term solution. We also knew that continuing to develop and support a tool like this wasn’t a core competency of ours, nor was it something we wanted to dedicate time and human effort towards, if we could help it.

Why Rootly?

Before using Rootly, we had actually started using another incident management solution. Like I mentioned, we didn’t know the market very well at the time. We used that previous solution for about a year, and we found it worked reasonably well. But as we continued to grow and evolve our incident response processes, we started looking more into what tooling could do for us and that’s when we found Rootly. We found that Rootly gave us a lot more customizability and additional functionality that we could utilize to improve our processes in many ways.

Different Needs for Different Business Units

At Lucidworks, we use Rootly in our incident response for two distinct product offerings that operate quite differently. With the previous tool, any decisions we made about setup needed to apply to both products, so one side was often getting the short end of the stick. For example, there were things we couldn’t change in how the forms were set up. Because these form fields weren’t tailored to our business needs, people would sometimes get confused and fill them out incorrectly, especially considering the time constraints and pressures that come with incident response. We provide detailed incident reports to our customers, so accuracy is crucially important.

Because Rootly is so configurable, we can now have one setup that's completely dedicated and customized towards the needs of the first product, and another one completely customized to the needs of the second, distinct product. Product incidents impact our clients in different ways depending on the specific product, so we needed one tool that could address both unique situations. In Rootly, we’ve found that solution, and as a result our incident response is much simpler, which means it’s much less error-prone as well.

A Partner in Incident Management

Rootly’s team has been really responsive to our needs since day one. The whole process to transition from our previous tool only took a couple days. Now, every new employee at Lucidworks is onboarded to Rootly. Any time we need help, we can reach out to the team directly and get the support we need. We’ve been impressed with how quickly the team is able to turn around things like feature requests or help with tricky configuration solutions.