How ROLLER scales globally while keeping a lean SRE team

About ROLLER

ROLLER is on a mission to bring happiness to the world by providing key technologies for 2,000+ leisure and attractions businesses in over 30 countries. Each year, ROLLER facilitates over 109 million guest experiences.

Founded: 2011 in Melbourne, Australia

Size: ~200 employees

An incident at ROLLER translates to children screaming in attraction park queues, which leads the company to maintain very high SLAs. ROLLER relies on Rootly to streamline its incident response process and deliver 99.99% availability while keeping a lean SRE team.

Delivering on SLAs and 99.99% availability with Rootly

ROLLER is a SaaS platform that becomes the lifeblood of many of its customers. ROLLER can manage everything from in-venue operations to e-commerce websites for leisure and attraction businesses. For that reason, ROLLER offers above-industry SLAs and keeps tight maintenance windows to ensure they can deliver 99.99% availability.

Before Rootly, ROLLER would struggle to communicate across all channels, CS teams, and status pages when an incident was resolved, which could put SLAs at risk. Rootly’s automations help the ROLLER team manage incidents smoothly while staying on top of their compliance requirements. Now, the team can focus on remediating the incident and then get reminders on tasks like following up with customers.

Thanks to Rootly, ROLLER now has codified its incident management process, which has contributed to the maturity of its reliability strategy. Nowadays, incidents at ROLLER have become sporadic and stem from planned events like important infrastructure upgrades.

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Rootly’s Slack-native workflows fit perfectly with how ROLLER works

ROLLER uses Slack to drive an open communication culture, resulting in over 1.5 million Slack messages exchanged yearly by its team. ROLLER engineers even have an emoji-based code to respond to each other.

Before using Rootly, ROLLER was using the popular legacy tools available on the market. But the team always had to adapt the way it worked to the tool, which was hardly compatible with their Slack-native way of working. Plus, this led to finicky processes, stitched together with manual steps and custom code.

With Rootly, incident communications through Slack at ROLLER became a breeze. The ROLLER team uses Rootly to go through the incident resolution process via Slack and can follow escalation paths without having to go to another app. ROLLER engineers also embrace their emoji culture with Rootly, where they can react to messages and have the platform pick up the messages for the incident timeline or generate Jira tickets from them automatically.

Expanding globally while keeping a lean SRE team

With offices in Melbourne, Sydney, London, San Francisco, and Austin, the company is planning ambitious expansion plans for the near future. However, only a small percentage of the engineering team are dedicated SREs, as the company relies on a distributed reliability strategy.

In a distributed reliability strategy, everyone needs access to incident management tools. Instead of having to set up different platforms or have fragmented processes, ROLLER SREs have consolidated their reliability practices under a single platform, Rootly.

Cloud, Security, and Infrastructure teams manage incidents through Rootly. Each team has workflows that suit their needs, all the way from incident declaration through custom forms. Even when a retrospective is created, ROLLER uses Rootly to create it in Confluence by default but saves it to Google Drive when it meets certain security criteria for added privacy.

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Saving 80% time on post-mortems with Rootly

Postmortems at ROLLER used to take 2–3 people to write because the company has to create two types of retrospectives: one for project managers and one with in-depth technical explanations. This process involved significant heavy lifting, especially around collecting the data about what had happened during the incident.

Figuring out the incident timeline was particularly difficult because ROLLER did not have a centralized way of communicating, and information was scattered throughout Slack. After the documents were written, several managers had to go through all the Slack messages again to make sure that the timelines reported in the post-mortem were correct.

Now, ROLLER gets timelines automatically because all incident communications go through a single Slack channel managed by Rootly. Responders are prompted to use the same channel and a standard workflow to manage the incident, which makes it simple to collect data for the post-mortem review. Rootly also helps ROLLER write the retrospective with its customizable templates.

Rootly as a global partner

ROLLER chose Rootly as an incident management partner years ago and has witnessed the platform’s evolution. Rootly has supported ROLLER through key growth years, starting from the Melbourne HQ and continuing through the company’s global expansion.

Rootly keeps improving the platform to make it easier for ROLLER to deliver happiness through leisure and attraction parks. Nobody wants to see children crying because a venue system is down!

From integrated Slack-native workflows to automated retrospective building, Rootly has become a key element of ROLLER’s reliability strategy. When you have to commit to high SLAs like ROLLER, you need an incident management partner like Rootly to deliver 99.99% availability.

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