Automate Stakeholder Updates During Outages with Rootly

During a critical outage, engineering teams are focused on resolution. At the same time, stakeholders across the business need timely and accurate updates. Manual communication processes are often slow, inconsistent, and distract engineers from fixing the problem. This disconnect can lead to frustration for both technical teams and business stakeholders. Rootly provides a solution by automating stakeholder communication, ensuring everyone stays informed without adding manual work for responders.

The High Cost of Poor Communication During Incidents

System downtime carries significant direct and indirect costs. For many mid-size and large enterprises, unplanned downtime can cost over $300,000 per hour. Beyond the immediate financial impact, poor communication during incidents creates hidden costs that can negatively affect the business long-term.

These include:

• Damaged customer trust from unreliable systems and inconsistent messaging.
• Decreased employee morale and burnout from a constant "firefighting" culture.
• Tarnished brand reputation that can outlast the incident itself.

These consequences highlight the need for a process that can unify engineering and management to drive incident clarity.

How does Rootly automate stakeholder communication during outages?

Rootly creates a single source of truth by centralizing all incident-related data and activities. This gives both technical and non-technical stakeholders objective clarity. The platform translates complex technical data into actionable business metrics, bridging the communication gap between engineering teams and management.

Rootly's workflow engine automates communication using configurable triggers. For example, a change in an incident's severity can automatically send tailored updates to different stakeholder groups. These updates can be delivered to platforms your teams already use, like Slack, Microsoft Teams [1], email, and status pages [2]. This level of automation ensures communication is timely and consistent, freeing engineers to focus on resolving the incident instead of manually drafting updates.

How can Rootly integrate with PagerDuty for faster escalations?

While PagerDuty is a powerful tool for on-call scheduling and alerting, Rootly provides a more complete and centralized incident management platform to orchestrate the entire response. The Rootly and PagerDuty integration speeds up response times by automating key tasks like paging responders, inviting them to communication channels, and assigning incident roles.

Here’s how the integration streamlines escalations:

• Rootly can ingest incoming PagerDuty events as alerts, which can then automatically declare an incident in Rootly based on predefined rules [3].
• Once an incident is created, Rootly workflows can trigger actions like paging on-call responders via PagerDuty or escalating to a secondary on-call [4].
• The integration maintains a two-way sync, ensuring actions in Rootly, such as acknowledging or resolving an incident, are reflected in PagerDuty and vice-versa for real-time status updates.
• Getting started is simplified with Smart Defaults, a feature that pre-configures settings to help teams implement best-practice workflows with minimal setup [5].

How do SREs use Rootly to coordinate response during a critical outage?

For Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and other responders, Rootly serves as the central command center for incident response. It provides a structured framework that guides teams through the entire incident lifecycle, eliminating confusion and ensuring all necessary steps are followed, even under pressure.

A typical incident in Rootly follows these phases:

1. Detection & Alerting: Rootly connects with monitoring tools to automatically create incidents from incoming alerts [6].
2. Triage & Assess: From the incident detail page, responders can quickly update the status, severity, and assign roles.
3. Respond & Coordinate: Teams use the dedicated Slack channel and incident timeline to collaborate while workflows handle notifying stakeholders and logging key events.
4. Resolve: Moving the incident to a "Resolved" state can trigger post-incident workflows, such as automatically creating a retrospective.

This structured approach transforms chaotic situations into a clear and organized response.

How can Rootly’s timeline reconstruction feature simplify postmortems?

The traditional process of creating postmortems, or retrospectives, is often a manual effort involving gathering chat logs, data, and timelines from different systems. This administrative work is tedious and can lead to an incomplete record of the incident.

Rootly solves this by automatically building a detailed incident timeline that captures every event, action, and decision. When an incident is resolved, Rootly can automatically create a retrospective populated with this rich timeline data. This feature saves engineers hours of administrative work and ensures the post-incident review is based on a complete and accurate record of what happened, leading to more effective learning.

Conclusion: Achieve Clarity and Control with Automated Updates

Automating stakeholder communication with Rootly is crucial for effective incident management. It helps reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), lessens the manual workload for engineers, and ensures communication is consistent and trustworthy. Rootly transforms incident response from a chaotic, reactive process into a structured, evidence-based one that drives continuous improvement.

Ready to unify your teams and build a more resilient future? Book a demo with Rootly today.

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