How SRE Teams Leverage Prometheus & Grafana with Rootly

Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) face the persistent challenge of managing the complexity of modern systems, particularly in dynamic Kubernetes environments. While the combination of Prometheus and Grafana serves as a cornerstone for visibility, this traditional stack often creates alert fatigue and manual toil, leading to SRE burnout. This is where Rootly enters the picture. Rootly provides the intelligent action and orchestration layer that supercharges the Prometheus and Grafana stack, transforming passive alerts into automated, streamlined incident response that drives down resolution times.

The Traditional Kubernetes Observability Stack Explained

Before diving into the solution, it's crucial to understand the roles of the two main tools SREs use for visibility and where they fall short.

How SRE Teams Use Prometheus and Grafana

Prometheus is the industry standard for scraping and storing time-series metric data from various components in a Kubernetes cluster. Grafana then provides powerful, customizable dashboards for visualizing the metric data collected by Prometheus. This combination is essential for gaining visibility into system health and performance and is a foundational part of any Kubernetes observability stack explained simply [5].

The Limitations of a Prometheus-Only Approach

Relying solely on Prometheus and Grafana creates significant pain points for SRE teams. These limitations can hinder efficiency and lead to slower incident resolution.

• Alert Fatigue: A high volume of alerts, many of which are duplicates or low-priority, desensitizes on-call engineers and is a direct path to burnout.
• Data Silos: Metrics from Prometheus and Grafana are often separate from logs and traces, forcing engineers to manually switch contexts between different tools to diagnose a single issue.
• Manual Toil: There is significant manual effort required to diagnose issues, identify root causes, and manage the incident response process based on alerts. This reactive, hands-on approach is a key drawback of traditional monitoring versus AI-powered solutions.

Attempts to bundle observability tools, like the now-deprecated tobs stack—which had over 575 stars on GitHub at its peak—have only highlighted the complexity of maintaining a cohesive, all-in-one solution [1].

How Rootly Supercharges the Prometheus & Grafana Stack

Rootly serves as the "action layer" that sits on top of the data provided by Prometheus and Grafana. It closes the critical gap between observability and action, turning raw data into decisive, automated workflows.

Centralizing Alerts to Reduce Noise and Automate Incidents

Rootly integrates directly with alerting tools like Prometheus Alertmanager to ingest alerts. From there, powerful workflows can automatically filter out noise, de-duplicate events, and group related signals into a single, actionable incident. This ensures SREs only focus on what truly matters, allowing teams to centralize all alerts into a single, streamlined workflow. The process can automatically create an incident in Rootly, kicking off the entire response process without any manual intervention.

Automating the Entire Incident Lifecycle

Once an incident is triggered by a Prometheus alert, Rootly automates the procedural steps that follow, saving teams critical time. Key automations include:

• Creating a dedicated Slack or Microsoft Teams channel for collaboration.
• Paging the correct on-call engineer via PagerDuty or Opsgenie.
• Automatically pulling in Grafana dashboard snapshots to provide immediate context within the incident channel.
• Generating a Jira ticket for tracking post-incident follow-up tasks.

These powerful automations are possible thanks to Rootly's extensive library of integrations that connect your entire toolchain.

Enriching Incidents with Kubernetes Context

Rootly’s native Kubernetes integration adds crucial context directly to your incidents. When an alert fires, Rootly can automatically pull information about related Kubernetes objects like pods, deployments, services, and nodes. This gives responders immediate insight into the state of the cluster without having to run kubectl commands manually, saving valuable time during a firefight.

Full-Stack Observability Platforms Comparison: Where Rootly Fits

Full-stack observability is the practice of consolidating telemetry data—metrics, logs, and traces—to get a complete, unified view of system health [6]. In a full-stack observability platforms comparison, many solutions focus only on data collection and visualization.

Rootly is different. It’s not just another data collection tool; it’s an action and orchestration platform. It enhances the value of your full-stack data by automating the response, answering the critical question of what to do once you've collected all that telemetry data [8].

Building a Modern Kubernetes Observability Stack for 2025

A practical, modern observability stack for SRE teams in 2025 should be modular, leveraging best-in-class tools for each specific function [3].

The Foundation: Data Collection

A complete Kubernetes observability stack is built on three pillars:

• Metrics: Prometheus remains the standard for metric collection.
• Logs: Lightweight collectors like FluentBit or Vector are popular for log aggregation.
• Traces: OpenTelemetry has become the de facto standard for distributed tracing, helping you understand request flows across services [4].

These tools form the foundational data-gathering layer of your stack.

The Intelligence Layer: Automated Incident Response with Rootly

Rootly acts as the intelligent orchestration layer that sits on top of this data foundation. It connects the dots from a Prometheus alert to a resolved incident by handling all the procedural work. This frees up SREs from manual toil, allowing them to focus on high-value proactive reliability work. The ultimate benefit is a dramatic reduction in Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

Conclusion: From Reactive Monitoring to Proactive Incident Management

While Prometheus and Grafana are powerful for gaining visibility, their true potential is unlocked when paired with an action and orchestration platform like Rootly. Rootly transforms a traditionally reactive monitoring stack into a proactive, automated incident management engine.

This shift not only reduces MTTR but also frees your engineers from constant firefighting, helping build more resilient systems and healthier engineering cultures. To see how Rootly can revolutionize your incident management, discover the advantages of AI-powered monitoring over traditional methods and book a demo today.

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