Combine Rootly with Prometheus & Grafana for Faster MTTR

Engineering teams often face a common challenge: a high volume of alerts from powerful but disconnected open-source tools. Prometheus excels at collecting metrics and triggering alerts, while Grafana provides rich data visualization. While these tools are effective at identifying problems, a critical gap exists in automating the response. This gap leads to manual toil, context-switching, and ultimately, a slower Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR).

Rootly serves as the central command center that integrates with this monitoring stack to automate the entire incident response lifecycle. It transforms passive alerts into immediate, automated actions, systematically reducing resolution times.

What’s the best way to use Rootly alongside Prometheus and Grafana?

The most effective strategy involves creating a seamless, automated workflow that connects alert detection directly to incident resolution. This approach turns a passive monitoring system into an active, automated response engine. The primary objective is to minimize manual intervention and accelerate remediation by establishing a reproducible, end-to-end process.

Step 1: Centralize Alerts with the Prometheus Alertmanager Integration

The first step is to establish a direct data channel from Prometheus to Rootly. Prometheus's Alertmanager component is designed to handle alerts and can be configured to forward notifications to a unique Rootly webhook URL. [1]

To implement this, you modify the alert-manager.yml file with the provided webhook endpoint and secret, ensuring alerts are securely transmitted to Rootly. Once received, this incoming alert can trigger predefined workflows. For example, based on the alert's labels, Rootly can automatically create an incident, notify specific communication channels, or page on-call responders. For detailed setup instructions, consult the Prometheus Alertmanager integration documentation.

Step 2: Enrich Incidents with Grafana Visualizations

Next, you enrich incident context by connecting Grafana. This is accomplished by setting up a webhook as a "Contact point" within Grafana's alerting settings. [2] When an alert fires, Grafana sends its payload to Rootly.

In response, Rootly can automatically attach a snapshot or a direct link to the relevant Grafana dashboard within the incident's dedicated channel. This provides responders with immediate visual context, eliminating the need to manually search for the correct dashboard. This step ensures that qualitative visual data complements the quantitative alert metrics. For more information, see the documentation for Grafana alerts. Workflow automation tools can also facilitate custom connections between these platforms. [3]

Step 3: Build Automated Incident Response Workflows

Once an alert is ingested from Prometheus or Grafana, Rootly’s customizable workflow automation engine takes over. Common automated actions that can be orchestrated include:

• Creating a dedicated Slack or Microsoft Teams channel and inviting necessary responders.
• Paging the correct on-call engineer using Rootly's native scheduling or integrations like PagerDuty.
• Enriching the incident with critical context, such as the direct link to the Grafana dashboard.
• Automatically generating a Jira ticket to track the incident and any follow-up actions.

This direct Rootly Jira integration streamlines project management from the moment an incident is declared, ensuring a formal record is created without manual effort. Rootly offers many powerful connections, including those with Splunk, Datadog, and Microsoft Teams.

How does Rootly integrate with OpenTelemetry for unified observability?

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is an open-source standard for collecting telemetry data—traces, metrics, and logs—to unify how systems are observed. A persistent challenge in achieving unified observability is "data silos," where these three pillars of observability are often stored and analyzed in separate systems, hindering a holistic view.

While various platforms focus on collecting and storing OTel data, Rootly’s strength is acting on the signals and alerts generated from that unified data. Rootly can ingest alerts from any OTel-compatible backend, such as Grafana or Datadog, via its flexible Generic Webhook integration. This capability allows Rootly to unify the response process, ensuring that insights derived from unified observability lead to immediate, automated action and a cohesive incident management lifecycle.

Expanding Your Automated Response with Key Integrations

Rootly's power extends far beyond Prometheus and Grafana by connecting to the entire software development and IT operations ecosystem. It serves as a central hub that unifies disparate tools into a single, automated workflow. You can explore a high-level overview of Rootly's available integrations to see the full breadth of its capabilities.

Rootly Jira Integration for Seamless Project Management

The Rootly Jira integration is a cornerstone of effective incident management. Rootly automates the creation of Jira tickets, pre-populating them with incident details like severity, affected services, and a summary. Workflows can be configured to keep the Jira ticket status synchronized with the live incident status in Rootly, providing a consistent source of truth.

The benefits are clear:

• Eliminates manual ticket creation.
• Reduces the potential for human error.
• Ensures all follow-up actions and postmortems are formally tracked for audit and review. [4]

Connecting to Your Entire Toolchain

Rootly reinforces its role as a central hub by offering deep integrations with other critical tools across different domains:

• Development & CI/CD: GitHub, GitLab, Kubernetes
• Communication: Slack and Microsoft Teams as incident command centers
• Alerting & On-Call: PagerDuty and Opsgenie for managing escalations

For any custom or in-house tools not on the list, the robust Rootly API allows for building custom connections to fit any unique environment.

Conclusion: From Monitoring to Automated Resolution

The combination of Prometheus, Grafana, and Rootly provides a powerful, end-to-end incident management solution. This integrated stack empowers teams to move from passive monitoring to an active, rapid, and automated response posture.

The key benefits are measurable and significant:

• Significantly reduced MTTR.
• Lessened cognitive load on engineers.
• Enforcement of consistent, auditable, and reproducible incident processes.

Explore Rootly's complete list of integrations or book a demo to see how centralizing your tools and automating your response can transform your incident management.

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