Automate Rollbacks & Tagging with Rootly Integrations

Modern DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams face immense pressure to maintain system stability while shipping features quickly. During high-stakes situations like a failed deployment, manual processes become a bottleneck. Manual rollbacks are often slow, stressful, and prone to human error, while manually tagging incidents with the correct context wastes valuable time that should be spent on resolution. Rootly’s integrations provide a powerful solution to automate these critical tasks, streamlining the entire incident lifecycle and improving system reliability.

What Rootly Integrations Help Automate Deployment Rollbacks?

Rootly automates deployment rollbacks by connecting your infrastructure and CI/CD tools, turning failure signals from monitoring platforms into immediate, hands-off remediation actions. This removes the need for an on-call engineer to manually diagnose a problem and run commands under pressure. Instead of paging a person to push a button, Rootly can push the button for you. This approach not only accelerates Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) but also reduces the cognitive load on your team.

However, it's important to configure these automations carefully. A rollback workflow should be triggered only by specific, well-defined failure conditions to avoid rolling back a deployment for a transient or low-impact issue. Building in manual approval steps or overrides for sensitive services is a recommended best practice. Rootly's flexible workflow builder makes it easy to add these safeguards, giving you the full benefit of automation without sacrificing control. You can explore how Rootly enables smart escalation and auto rollbacks to enhance your incident response.

Kubernetes Integration for Instant Rollbacks

For teams running on Kubernetes, a failed deployment can quickly impact users. Rootly's native Kubernetes integration provides a direct path to automated rollbacks.

The process is seamless:

1. Detection: An alert from a monitoring tool like Prometheus or Datadog signals a critical error spike following a new deployment.
2. Triage: Rootly automatically ingests the alert and initiates a new incident, pulling in all the relevant context from the alert payload.
3. Action: A pre-configured workflow identifies the incident as being related to a specific Kubernetes deployment and executes a kubectl rollout undo command via a shell command task to revert to the last stable version.

This entire sequence can happen in seconds, long before a human could even begin investigating. While manual rollbacks are always an option, automation with Rootly ensures speed, consistency, and reliability when it matters most [2]. These auto Kubernetes rollbacks are a cornerstone of modern incident management.

CI/CD Integrations (GitHub & GitLab)

Rootly can also trigger rollbacks directly within your CI/CD pipeline. By integrating with tools like GitHub and GitLab, you can automate remediation at the source code level. A Rootly workflow can be configured to call a webhook that triggers a job in GitHub Actions or GitLab CI. This job can be designed to automatically revert a problematic pull request or redeploy a previously tagged stable version of the application.

Automating this process requires securely managing permissions, for example, by using a Personal Access Token (PAT) with the correct scopes to interact with the GitHub API [6]. While this creates a powerful link between your incident response and development workflows, it's crucial to ensure these credentials are secure and the rollback jobs have checks to prevent unintended changes.

IaC Integrations (Terraform & Ansible)

Rootly’s flexibility extends to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools through webhooks and script-based workflow tasks. For instance, if an alert indicates a misconfiguration pushed via Terraform, a Rootly workflow can be triggered. This workflow could call a secure API endpoint that runs a targeted terraform apply command to revert to a known good state or execute an Ansible playbook to correct the configuration. This capability allows you to practice automated remediation with IaC and Kubernetes, creating a self-healing infrastructure.

How Does Rootly Combine Observability Data with Automation Triggers?

Rootly acts as a central nervous system for your incident response, ingesting alerts and data from a wide range of monitoring and observability platforms. By integrating with tools like Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, PagerDuty, and Prometheus, Rootly doesn't just receive alerts—it receives rich, contextual data. This includes everything from error rates and latency metrics to specific service names and customer impact signals.

This data is the key to unlocking intelligent automation. A workflow condition in Rootly can inspect an alert's payload to determine the precise nature of an issue. For example, a workflow can be configured to trigger an automated rollback only if the error rate for a specific service exceeds 5% and the alert priority is P1. This ensures that automations are precise and context-aware, preventing unnecessary actions for minor issues. This approach is a core principle of effective incident response automation, which helps reduce alert fatigue and improve team health [8].

Can Rootly Automatically Tag Incidents with Service Ownership Metadata?

Yes, Rootly excels at automatically tagging incidents with service ownership, on-call schedules, and other critical metadata. This functionality eliminates the manual toil of digging through wikis or internal dashboards to find the right on-call engineer or understand a service's dependencies during a high-stress incident.

Integrating with Service Catalogs like Cortex and Backstage

Rootly’s integrations with service catalogs like Cortex and Backstage are fundamental to this capability. This integration powers a seamless and automated information-gathering process:

1. An incident is created for an affected service (e.g., api-gateway).
2. A Rootly workflow automatically queries the service catalog’s API for api-gateway.
3. The workflow pulls back crucial data like the owning team, the current on-call engineer from PagerDuty, key dependencies, and a link to the team's runbook.
4. Rootly uses this data to automatically tag the incident, add the correct team and engineer to the incident Slack channel, and initiate the appropriate escalation policy.

This enriches the incident with vital context instantly, ensuring the right people are involved from the very beginning.

Custom Tagging with ServiceNow Integration

This powerful automation extends to other systems of record, such as ServiceNow. Using Rootly's workflow engine, you can create automations that keep your incident data synchronized across platforms. For example, a workflow can automatically create a ServiceNow incident ticket and then use Rootly's HTTP Client workflow action to interact with the ServiceNow API. This allows you to add affected Rootly services as Affected CIs (Configuration Items) in the corresponding ticket, ensuring your CMDB is always up-to-date. You can find more details on configuring these types of workflows.

What Are the Most Useful Rootly Integrations for DevOps Teams?

Rootly's true power comes from its deep ecosystem of integrations that connect the entire DevOps toolchain. While every team's stack is different, several categories of integrations are particularly critical for modern DevOps and SRE teams.

• Alerting & On-Call: PagerDuty, Opsgenie. These are essential for ingesting alerts and managing escalations.
• Observability & Monitoring: Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, Prometheus. These provide the rich data triggers needed for intelligent, automated workflows.
• Infrastructure & CI/CD: Kubernetes, GitHub, GitLab, Terraform. These enable automated remediation actions like deployment rollbacks.
• Service Catalogs: Cortex, Backstage. These provide service ownership and dependency context for automated tagging and routing.
• Communication: Slack, Microsoft Teams. These centralize all incident communication and enable powerful ChatOps capabilities.
• Ticketing & Project Management: Jira, ServiceNow. These automate the creation and tracking of follow-up tasks and tickets, ensuring no action item is lost.

Conclusion

Rootly’s integrations are the key to unlocking true incident management automation. By connecting your tools for observability, CI/CD, and service ownership, you can empower your teams to automate critical tasks like deployment rollbacks and contextual incident tagging. This shift from manual to automated response reduces MTTR, prevents engineer burnout, and helps you build more resilient, reliable systems.

Ready to see how Rootly can transform your incident management? Book a demo today.

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