How Momentum minimizes the number of engineers on-call with Rootly AI

“I chose Rootly over FireHydrant due to the team’s vision, performance, and trajectory”

Santiago Suarez Ordoñez

Former CTO and Co-Founder of Blameless (acquired by FireHydrant)

About Momentum

Momentum is an AI-powered Go-To-Market data orchestration platform, co-founded by Santiago Suarez Ordoñez, former CTO and Co-Founder of Blameless (acquired by FireHydrant).

Founded: 2020 in San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA‍

Size: ~200 employees

At a critical growth stage, Momentum leverages AI to stay ahead of the market at every level of its operation. The company found Rootly AI to be the most comprehensive solution in the incident management space at the moment. Momentum is convinced Rootly’s vision for an AI SRE is the right one and is excited to see how quickly the solution is evolving on a week-to-week basis.

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Rootly AI makes on-call with less engineers possible

Momentum is a fast-growing company with global customers like Honeycomb, Sentry, and 1Password. Reliability is top of mind, and 24/7 on-call rotations are a requirement at this scale. However, Momentum also needs to be mindful about how it grows its engineering team and the additional churn that on-call shifts add to engineers.

“AI is evolving fast. And Rootly lets us get the latest on AI, fast. For us, it's about how many engineers we hire, and how many we need to wake up at 3 am, and that makes the difference.”‍
Santiago Suarez Ordoñez, CEO and Co-Founder, Momentum

As an AI-forward leader, Santiago is balancing this tension with AI. Rootly AI is helping Momentum SREs and developers do more while managing incidents. From simple tasks like LLM-based stakeholders communications to advanced ML-driven root cause analysis, Rootly AI helps responders throughout the incident lifecycle.

Bridging the gap between developers and operations

Traditionally, SREs, DevOps, and anyone who was in charge of putting code into production knew the ins and outs of how the systems were run, versus the developers who built the software. The problem came when an incident happened late at night, and the SRE holding the pager didn’t understand the application code she was trying to fix.

Nowadays, under the premise of you build it, you run it, it is common for developers to also be on call for their service. Momentum has found Rootly AI helps not only distribute the on-call shifts easily across myriad teams but also bridge the knowledge gaps between operations and developers.

Developers can ask Rootly AI questions about their infrastructure, like how to restart the pod, when they’re on call, and SREs can ask about how applications work, like how to spin up a development environment for it.

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Towards automated incident response

For Momentum’s CTO, the objective of AI in incident response is not to replace SREs but to remove toil so they can focus on higher-value work.

“With Rootly AI, the right person alone can handle an incident, versus in the past, a team working in parallel, all of them taking minutes if not hours to complete their tasks”‍
Santiago Suarez Ordoñez, CEO and Co-Founder, Momentum

With Rootly AI, Momentum responders can have AI execute runbooks that they previously had to manually go through with extreme care so as not to make mistakes while rebooting a server or restoring a database.

Rootly AI Vision and Team

AI is moving at an unprecedented pace. For Momentum, it is essential to work with technology partners that can keep up with that pace and understand what the right direction is.

“I bet on the team that is executing. I see them perform, I buy into their vision. Of course, you also want to see the customers and the trajectory, and Rootly has that going for them. I’m impressed by the Rootly team and their ability to get there.”‍
Santiago Suarez Ordoñez, CEO and Co-Founder, Momentum

Momentum is already getting the most out of Rootly AI, but it counts on the roadmap to plan how it will evolve its engineering organization.

Momentum relies on Rootly AI to minimize the number of engineers they need to keep on call and is informing its engineering strategy with Rootly’s roadmap. Given Momentum’s business strategy to leverage immediate access to the latest AI to stay ahead of its competition, Rootly ensures it keeps a competitive edge in its reliability strategy.

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