Can Rootly Auto-Assign Incident Commanders by Severity?

Yes, Rootly can automatically assign incident commanders based on incident severity using its powerful Workflows feature. This automation is a cornerstone for reducing the manual, repetitive tasks—often called toil—that consume valuable engineering time during an outage [1]. By codifying your response processes, you ensure the right leadership is engaged immediately, accelerating the entire incident response lifecycle.

This article details how to set this up, compares Rootly's automation to PagerDuty's, and discusses the features that are most effective for reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

How to Automatically Assign Incident Commanders Using Rootly Workflows

The core of Rootly's automation capabilities is its Workflows engine, which translates your incident management playbooks into automated, repeatable actions. Each workflow operates on a simple and powerful logic: a trigger initiates the process, conditions determine if it should run, and tasks execute the predefined actions.

This system provides granular control over every stage of an incident, from declaration to resolution. You can learn more about the different types of workflows in Rootly and how they can be used to streamline your operations.

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Your Auto-Assignment Workflow

Setting up a workflow to assign an incident commander based on severity is a straightforward process in the Rootly UI.

1. Set the Trigger: The workflow should initiate the moment an incident begins. Select Incident is created as the trigger. This ensures the workflow runs at the earliest possible moment.
2. Define the Run Conditions: This is where you specify the severity logic. Set the condition to Run if Incident Severity is and select the desired level, such as SEV0 or SEV1. You can create distinct workflows for each severity level to assign different on-call schedules or teams.
3. Configure the Action: The final step is to execute the assignment. Add the workflow task Auto-assign role from on-call rotation.
   • Set the Incident Role to Incident Commander.
   • Select the PagerDuty Schedule/Escalation Policy that corresponds to your on-call commander rotation for that specific severity level.

This configuration links an incident's severity directly to the correct on-call personnel in PagerDuty, ensuring the designated commander is paged and assigned the role automatically. You can explore a detailed list of available PagerDuty workflow actions to further customize your response.

How Does Rootly’s Automation Differ from PagerDuty Workflows?

While both Rootly and PagerDuty offer automation, they serve fundamentally different purposes within the incident management ecosystem.

PagerDuty excels at alerting and on-call management. Its workflows are primarily designed to route alerts and ensure the right individuals are notified promptly. With a 19.5% market share, PagerDuty is a well-established leader for making sure critical alerts don't go unnoticed [3].

Rootly’s comprehensive approach extends far beyond notification. It serves as a complete incident management hub that orchestrates the entire response process. While PagerDuty wakes someone up, Rootly provides the command center with all the tools, context, and automated support needed to solve the problem. Through its seamless PagerDuty integration, Rootly leverages PagerDuty's alerting strengths and builds a full-scale response framework on top of it.

Examples of Rootly's extended automation include:

• Automatically creating dedicated incident Slack channels and Zoom bridges.
• Assigning a full suite of roles (e.g., Comms Lead, Scribe) in addition to the Incident Commander.
• Updating internal and external status pages.
• Generating post-incident retrospectives from a template.

User comparisons reflect this distinction, with Rootly earning a high rating of 9.3 out of 10 for its specialized focus on deep, end-to-end incident lifecycle automation [2].

What Rootly Features Are Most Effective for Reducing MTTR in Large Enterprises?

For large enterprises, reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) requires minimizing friction at every stage of an incident. Several Rootly features are designed specifically for this purpose.

• Automated Incident Declaration: Rootly can ingest alerts from monitoring tools like PagerDuty or Datadog to automatically declare incidents that meet predefined criteria. This eliminates the human delay at the start of an event, allowing teams to begin investigation immediately [4].
• Automated Team Assembly: As detailed above, automatically assigning the Incident Commander and other critical roles ensures the right experts are assembled in seconds, not minutes.
• Smart Defaults: For teams looking for a quick setup, Rootly’s PagerDuty integration offers Smart Defaults. This feature provides pre-configured settings for common actions like paging responders, offering the benefits of automation without needing to build complex workflows from scratch.
• Centralized Communication: By automatically creating incident-specific Slack channels, Rootly centralizes all communication, commands, and updates. This prevents context from getting lost across different DMs and channels.

What Metrics Should I Track in Rootly to Measure Incident Response Speed?

You can't improve what you don't measure. Rootly’s built-in analytics automatically capture the key performance indicators (KPIs) needed to improve incident response speed. Because Rootly logs a timestamp for every action, from acknowledgment to resolution, generating these metrics requires no manual effort.

Key metrics to track in Rootly's analytics dashboard include:

Metric

Definition

What It Measures

Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA)

The average time from when an alert fires to when the first responder acknowledges it.

The efficiency of your alerting and on-call notification process.

Mean Time to Assemble (MTTA)

The average time it takes to gather the core incident response team (e.g., Incident Commander).

The effectiveness of your role assignment and team mobilization procedures.

Mean Time to Mitigate (MTTM)

The average time from when an incident is declared until the customer-facing impact is eliminated.

The speed of your team in applying a temporary fix or workaround.

Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)

The average time from when an incident is declared until the issue is fully resolved and services are restored.

The overall efficiency of your end-to-end incident management process.

Tracking these metrics allows teams to visualize trends over time and make data-driven decisions to refine their response playbooks for continuous improvement.

Conclusion: Build a Faster, More Reliable Incident Response Process

Rootly's flexible workflows are the key to automatically assigning incident commanders based on severity. This capability, combined with a full suite of automation features, directly attacks sources of delay and systematically reduces MTTR.

By automating procedural steps, Rootly frees engineers from administrative toil, allowing them to focus on what matters most: solving complex problems. This approach builds a more consistent, efficient, and less stressful incident response culture, transforming incidents from chaotic scrambles into structured, data-driven processes.

Ready to see how automated role assignment can streamline your incident response? Book a demo with Rootly today.

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