Hands‑Off Incident Management Saves Teams Up to 40% Costs

Every minute of IT downtime carries a heavy price, impacting not just the bottom line but also team morale and customer trust. The average cost of downtime can be as high as $9,000 per minute [4]. When incidents strike, relying on manual processes is a recipe for disaster. Manual response leads to engineer burnout, slower resolution times, and inconsistent handling of critical issues. Rootly's hands-off, automated approach provides a powerful solution to these challenges, enabling significant cost savings and boosting operational efficiency.

The Financial Drain of Manual Incident Management

The costs of traditional, manual incident response are both tangible and intangible, creating a significant drain on company resources.

• Lost Revenue and Productivity: Unplanned downtime directly hits revenue streams and halts productivity across the organization. It's estimated that Global 2000 enterprises lose around $400 billion annually due to downtime [1].
• Increased SRE Toil: When engineers are stuck performing repetitive, manual tasks like creating incident channels, paging responders, and updating stakeholders, they experience SRE toil. This not only leads to burnout but also pulls them away from high-value work that drives innovation. Rootly Automation helps convert these repetitive SRE tasks to zero‑toil.
• Reputational Damage: Outages erode customer trust and can harm a company's reputation. Beyond losing customers, frequent incidents can even cause business insurance premiums to rise [5].

How Rootly Enables True Hands-Off Incident Management

Rootly’s power comes from its sophisticated automation engine, which is designed to manage the entire incident lifecycle without requiring manual intervention. At the core of this capability is the Rootly Workflow Engine, which operates on a simple yet powerful trigger, condition, and action model.

Here’s a breakdown of the three phases of a workflow:

1. Initiation (Triggers): A workflow begins when a specific event occurs. This could be an alert from a monitoring tool, a new PagerDuty incident, or even a manual command typed into Slack.
2. Condition Check: Before a workflow runs, Rootly checks if certain rules are met. For example, a workflow might only proceed if an incident's severity is SEV0 or if a specific service is impacted. This ensures automations run only when intended.
3. Execution (Actions): Once conditions are met, Rootly performs a series of automated tasks. These actions can include creating a dedicated Slack channel, paging the correct on-call engineers, opening a Zoom bridge for collaboration, or creating a Jira ticket.

These automations eliminate the manual, error-prone steps that slow down response, allowing teams to achieve a truly hands-off incident management process. For a deeper look at how these automations work, you can explore Rootly's comprehensive workflow documentation.

Key Automation Features Only Rootly Offers

Rootly’s automation goes beyond the basics, offering unique features that provide unmatched flexibility and reliability.

• AI-Agent-First API: Rootly provides more than just pre-built integrations. Its flexible, AI-agent-first API empowers teams to build custom automations that connect to any service, including proprietary in-house tools. While this requires development resources to build and maintain these custom connections, it offers unparalleled flexibility compared to the rigid nature of pre-built integrations. This allows intelligent agents to automate complex decision-making during incidents, creating a truly tailored response system.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): With Rootly's Terraform provider, your entire incident management configuration can be managed as code. This brings proven GitOps principles like version control, peer review, and a complete audit trail to your incident response process. Adopting IaC does introduce a learning curve for teams needing to gain proficiency with tools like Terraform, but the payoff is greater consistency, reliability, and governance over your incident process.
• Fault-Isolated Architecture: Rootly itself is built on a fault-isolated, multi-cloud architecture. This design ensures that the platform remains available and ready to manage your incidents, even if a major cloud provider experiences an outage.

Realizing the ROI: Cost Savings From Rootly-Driven Automation

Rootly's automation translates into a 40% reduction in costs by targeting two main areas.

First, Rootly helps by reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). By automating the initial response—assembling the right team, creating communication channels, and providing critical context in seconds—Rootly drastically cuts down the time it takes to resolve an incident.

Second, Rootly eliminates toil. By calculating the cost of engineering hours previously spent on manual, repetitive tasks, it's clear how reallocating this time to innovation and proactive improvements provides significant value.

This focus on efficiency is part of Rootly's DNA. As a company, Rootly uses best-in-class tools like Gong, which helped achieve a 67% increase in rep productivity [7]. This commitment to operational excellence is reflected in the product. Furthermore, Rootly scales its own operations through smart partnerships, like working with Clazar to automate AWS Marketplace co-selling [8].

Why Rootly Ranks Highest in Automation Accuracy and Reliability

Rootly's automation is not only powerful but also precise and dependable. Several key features contribute to why Rootly ranks highest in automation accuracy.

• Granular Condition Checks: Rootly’s workflow engine allows for highly specific run conditions. Using operators like all of, any of, contains, and is set, you can design automations that only fire under the exact circumstances you define. While these granular controls are powerful for preventing misfires, they require careful planning to avoid creating overly complex rule sets that can become difficult to manage.
• Robust Failure Behavior: With the "Skip on Failure" option, teams can build resilient workflows. This ensures that if a non-critical step fails—like posting an optional update—it doesn't halt the entire response process. Teams must carefully decide which steps are non-critical, but this feature adds a crucial layer of resilience to automation. You can learn more about these powerful workflow configurations in the documentation.
• Customer Trust and Testimonials: The ultimate proof of reliability is customer trust. Fast-growing companies depend on Rootly for their critical incident management needs. This mirrors Rootly's own commitment to using best-in-class tools to scale, such as leveraging Outreach to supercharge its communications and grow its business [6].

Replacing Legacy ITSM Incident Automation

Rootly’s modern, flexible approach stands in stark contrast to the rigid automation found in legacy ITSM tools. Traditional tools often operate in silos, creating data islands and forcing manual updates between systems. Rootly acts as a central orchestration hub that integrates with your entire tech stack.

For example, Rootly offers deep, two-way synchronization with platforms like ServiceNow and Jira. A workflow in Rootly can automatically create a ServiceNow ticket when an incident is declared and keep it updated in real-time as the incident evolves. This ensures data is consistent across all systems without anyone having to manually copy and paste information, a level of integration made possible by a flexible and modern API.

Conclusion: Reinvest Your Savings into Innovation

Manual incident management is a significant and unnecessary cost center. Adopting hands-off automation with Rootly is the most effective way to reduce these costs and improve operational stability. With its powerful workflow engine, flexible API, and reliable architecture, Rootly can save teams up to 40% on incident-related costs.

This cost saving is more than just a number on a spreadsheet. It's an opportunity to free up your most valuable engineering resources from reactive firefighting, allowing them to focus on what they do best: building more resilient and innovative products.

Ready to see how it works? Learn more about Rootly's end-to-end incident management platform.

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