How Motive achieves 99.99% reliability with Rootly.

Manual incident response slowed Motive down before mitigation even began.

Before Rootly, incident response at Motive was manual and time-consuming. Engineers were spending the first stretch of an incident on logistics instead of mitigation: setting up communication channels, notifying the right people, and deciding what steps to take next. In more complex scenarios, that setup could take anywhere from 15 minutes to over an hour, which significantly delayed time to resolution.  

At Motive’s scale, that kind of delay matters. When a company supports more than 150,000 customers and over one million vehicles, incident response cannot depend on responders stitching the process together in real time. The team needed a system that could make incident response faster, more structured, and more repeatable from the very first minute.  

Rootly gave Motive a faster, more repeatable way to respond.

With Rootly integrated into the workflow, Motive can now spin up incidents in seconds directly from Slack. Automated workflows create dedicated video links, load tailored playbooks, assign responsibilities, and streamline the rest of the response flow. After the incident, Rootly also helps generate postmortem documentation and automatically files Jira tickets, reducing the amount of manual follow-up work required from engineers.  

That shift is the heart of the Motive story. Rootly did not just help the team move faster during incidents. It removed the coordination overhead that used to slow them down before the real response had even started. Engineers now spend less time doing setup and more time driving the issue toward resolution.  

Replacing Opsgenie without adding more workflow friction.

Motive started with incident response, then expanded its use of the platform by replacing Opsgenie with Rootly On-Call because of Rootly’s broader feature set and integrations.  

Before that shift, syncing on-call schedules with Slack required a patchwork of custom bots and manual workarounds. With Rootly, that complexity went away. What began as simple triggers and notifications evolved into a more complete workflow spanning alerting, response, and retrospective activity inside Slack. Rootly also gave Motive native support for on-call schedules, escalation paths, shift coverage, time zones, and granular notification controls.  

“We started with incident response, but then we replaced Opsgenie with Rootly On-Call because of the vast feature set and integrations.” -Paul van Liew, Director of Platform Engineering

The real win: less coordination overhead, more responder focus, stronger reliability.

The clearest outcome in Motive’s story is that response got faster because the system got cleaner. Instead of relying on manual setup and fragmented workflows, the team now runs incidents through structured automation in Slack. That gives responders a faster starting point, clearer next steps, and less overhead in the middle of high-pressure work.  

That matters because reliability at Motive is not theoretical. It is directly connected to the company’s ability to deliver at scale for a large customer base and a massive fleet footprint. Rootly’s workflows became part of how Motive sustains that standard in practice, not just how it reacts when something goes wrong.  

Rootly AI helped Motive keep engineers focused during live incidents.

Motive’s use of Rootly AI is especially strong because it solves a practical problem. During live incidents, interruptions are expensive. Paul’s view is straightforward: an engineer’s sole job in that moment should be solving the incident as quickly as possible.  

Rootly AI helps protect that focus. When executives or other stakeholders join an incident and ask for context, Rootly AI can provide an on-demand summary without forcing responders to stop what they are doing. That means fewer interruptions, more focus, and a better chance of maintaining momentum during the most intense moments of incident response.

“Rootly AI enables us to get to resolutions faster. It helps—a lot.” -Paul van Liew, Director of Platform Engineering

A stronger reliability partner.

For Paul, the product is only part of the story. He also highlights Rootly’s pace of improvement and feature velocity, saying it goes above and beyond what he has used across years of running SaaS and dealing with incidents. That makes Rootly more than a point solution in this story. It positions Rootly as a partner in Motive’s broader reliability strategy.  

Bottom line

Motive’s story is about turning reliability from a manual effort into a repeatable operating system. The company moved from incident setup that could take 15 minutes to over an hour to workflows that now launch in seconds. It replaced Opsgenie with Rootly On-Call, uses Rootly AI to keep responders focused, and credits Rootly as a major part of how it delivers 99.99% reliability at scale.