Full‑Stack Observability Platforms: Rootly vs Competitors

Modern IT systems are more complex than ever, creating significant challenges for Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) trying to maintain system reliability. Full-stack observability offers the deep insights needed to understand system performance, but simply collecting data isn't enough. This article compares full-stack observability platforms, contrasting data-centric tools with action-oriented platforms like Rootly. As tool sprawl leads to a wealth of data but no clear path to action, a central incident management platform can unify disparate systems. With the right strategy, teams can centralize observability and secure the enterprise at scale.

Understanding the Traditional Observability Stack

A traditional observability setup is often built around powerful open-source tools. While this approach provides a solid foundation for monitoring, it has inherent limitations in complex, cloud-native environments where data volumes are massive and interdependencies are intricate.

How SRE Teams Use Prometheus and Grafana

For many SRE teams, Prometheus and Grafana are the cornerstones of their Kubernetes observability stack. This is how SRE teams use Prometheus and Grafana: Prometheus excels at scraping and storing time-series metric data, giving teams a rich dataset on system performance. Grafana then allows them to build powerful dashboards for visualizing this data.

While effective for monitoring, this combination comes with a tradeoff. Without careful management, it can lead to an overwhelming number of dashboards and alerts, contributing to alert fatigue and making it difficult to identify which notifications truly matter. This highlights the limitations of traditional, reactive monitoring, where AI-powered monitoring offers a significant edge by helping teams process data more intelligently.

The Limitations of Siloed Data and Tool Sprawl

SREs using a fragmented stack often face common pain points that slow down issue resolution. An incident management tool is software designed to help teams identify, manage, and resolve IT incidents efficiently [3]. Without a central platform, teams struggle with:

• Alert Fatigue: A high volume of low-priority or duplicate alerts desensitizes engineers, increasing the risk of missing critical issues.
• Data Silos: When metrics, logs, and traces live in separate systems, engineers must manually switch between tools to piece together the full context of an incident.
• Manual Toil: Significant manual effort is required to diagnose issues, communicate with stakeholders, and manage the incident response process.

Full-Stack Observability Platforms Comparison

The industry is shifting toward unified platforms that consolidate metrics, logs, and traces. In this full-stack observability platforms comparison, the market can be framed in two main categories: all-in-one data platforms that focus on aggregation and specialized action platforms that focus on orchestration.

Platform Type

Core Focus

Primary Goal

Example

Action & Orchestration

Incident Lifecycle Automation

Turn data into automated action

Rootly

Data Aggregation

Metrics, Logs, & Traces

Unify data in one place

Datadog

Rootly: The Action and Orchestration Platform

Rootly operates as an intelligent layer on top of your existing observability data. Its purpose is not to replace monitoring tools but to translate their insights into swift, automated action. Rootly solves the "so what?" problem of disconnected alerts by orchestrating the entire incident lifecycle, from detection to resolution.

Instead of competing with tools like Datadog or Grafana, Rootly integrates with them to make them more powerful. It connects your entire toolchain, creating a single, streamlined workflow that unifies monitoring, alerting, communication, and project management [4].

Datadog: The All-in-One Data Platform

Datadog is a comprehensive, unified platform offering monitoring for IT, Dev, and Ops teams. Its core strength lies in collecting, processing, and visualizing metrics, logs, and traces in a single place. This all-in-one approach helps teams break down data silos and gain a holistic view of their environment [8].

While Datadog includes some incident management features, its primary focus remains data aggregation and analysis. On third-party review sites, Datadog is recognized as a strong data-centric monitoring service, whereas Rootly scores higher (9.4 out of 10) and specializes in automating incident response [1]. The two work best together, with Datadog providing the data and Rootly orchestrating the action.

Other Competitors in the Observability Space

The observability market is diverse, with many tools specializing in different areas to meet various needs [6]. Understanding each tool's focus helps you build the right stack for your specific requirements [7].

• Splunk: A powerful platform known for its strengths in deep log analysis and Security Information and Event Management (SIEM).
• Grafana: A leading open-source visualization tool that can connect to various data sources, including Prometheus, offering flexibility for building custom dashboards.

AI Observability and Automation SRE Synergy

The ai observability and automation sre synergy is transforming IT operations from a reactive to a proactive discipline. This approach allows teams to move beyond manual analysis and embrace intelligent, automated workflows. AI augments SRE capabilities by handling repetitive tasks and uncovering insights that would be nearly impossible for humans to find in vast datasets.

Key capabilities of AI for IT Operations (AIOps) platforms include:

• Intelligent alert noise reduction
• Automated event correlation across different data sources
• Predictive analytics to forecast potential failures
• Accelerated root cause analysis

By adopting an AI-powered monitoring approach, SREs can reduce toil and focus on strategic initiatives that improve long-term reliability.

How Rootly Creates a Unified Workflow

Rootly's primary role is to serve as a central hub connecting your entire incident response toolchain. The true value of observability lies not just in collecting data but in acting on it intelligently and consistently. Rootly ensures that every alert is handled according to best practices, every time.

Centralizing Alerts from Datadog, Splunk, and More

Rootly ingests alerts from any monitoring tool through native integrations or generic webhooks. For example, a high-severity alert from Datadog can automatically create an incident in Rootly, pull in relevant graph snapshots from Datadog, and page the on-call engineer [5]. This seamless workflow connects your monitoring data directly to your response process. Rootly’s ecosystem of integrations with tools like Splunk, Datadog, and Grafana ensures all your signals are unified in one place.

Automating Escalations with PagerDuty and Opsgenie

It's important to distinguish between an alerting platform like PagerDuty and a full incident management solution like Rootly. While PagerDuty is excellent at notifying the right person, Rootly automates the entire process that follows. For example, a SEV0 incident declared in Rootly can trigger a page in PagerDuty. If the alert isn't acknowledged within a set time, Rootly can automatically escalate to the next person on call, create a dedicated Slack channel, and start a Zoom bridge.

This automation removes manual handoffs and ensures rapid human intervention. By integrating tightly with tools like PagerDuty, Rootly closes the loop between alerting and action.

Conclusion: Building a Resilient Stack with Rootly

Modern observability is about more than just data collection—it's about intelligent action. While data platforms like Datadog are excellent for gathering insights across your stack, Rootly provides the essential layer for turning those insights into a fast, automated, and consistent response.

The most effective stack combines a strong data foundation with an intelligent orchestration engine. By connecting your observability and alerting tools to Rootly, you can unify your incident management process, reduce manual toil, and resolve issues faster than ever.

Ready to see how Rootly can unify your tools and streamline your incident management? Book a demo to get started.

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