Rootly AI Detects Duplicate Incidents Automatically

In incident management, on-call teams are often overwhelmed by a flood of alerts from various monitoring systems. Many of these alerts are duplicates triggered by the same underlying issue, leading to alert fatigue and wasted effort. With the cost of IT downtime being a significant business concern, every second counts. For over 90% of mid-size and large enterprises, the average cost of downtime now exceeds $300,000 per hour [7]. Rootly AI is a powerful solution designed to bring order to this chaos, starting with its ability to automatically handle duplicate incidents.

The Challenge of Duplicate Incidents and Alert Fatigue

Duplicate incidents are a major problem for on-call teams. When a single, unresolved issue persists, monitoring tools often send repeated notifications, creating unnecessary noise. This has several negative consequences:

• Alert Fatigue: As responders are continuously bombarded with pages, they can become desensitized, increasing the risk that a new, critical incident is missed.
• Wasted Resources: Multiple team members might begin investigating the same problem, unaware that it's already being handled by a colleague. This creates redundant work and slows down resolution.
• Lost Context: Information about a single issue gets scattered across multiple tickets or alerts, making it difficult to track the full incident timeline and response effort.

Traditional incident management tools often struggle to handle this influx of repetitive data, leading to significant inefficiencies and burnout [5].

How Rootly Automatically Detects and Deduplicates Incidents

So, can Rootly AI flag duplicated incidents automatically? The answer is yes. Rootly uses a powerful, two-layer deduplication system to automatically detect and combine duplicate alerts, ensuring your team only sees unique, actionable information. This system provides a clean, consolidated view of all incoming Alerts so responders can focus on what matters.

Layer 1: Combining Alerts by a Unique Identifier

The primary method for deduplication is configurable at the Alert Source level in Rootly. This gives you granular control over how alerts are combined.

Here’s how to set it up:

1. Navigate to an Alert Source and enable the "Combine duplicate alerts into one alert" option.
2. Choose a stable identifier from the alert's payload. You can use JSONPath to select a specific field, like an alert_id or issue_key. Rootly’s UI simplifies this by allowing you to copy the JSONPath directly from a sample payload.

When a new alert arrives with a matching identifier, Rootly doesn't create a new alert. Instead, it performs two key actions:

• It increments a request counter on the original alert, which appears as a badge (e.g., x3).
• It adds an event to the original alert's timeline, preserving the context that another signal was received without creating more noise.

Layer 2: Payload-Based Duplicate Suppression

Rootly’s second layer of defense against duplicates is a built-in safety net. This feature automatically suppresses any incoming alert that has an exact payload match with a previously received alert for the same issue. This requires no complex configuration and works out of the box to catch any identical alerts that may slip through other rules.

Important: Deduplication vs. Alert Grouping

It's important to understand the difference between deduplication and alert grouping to use Rootly effectively.

• Deduplication: Collapses multiple instances of the same alert into a single, clean record.
• Alert Grouping: Combines similar but distinct alerts to provide broader context on a widespread issue, such as multiple services failing in the same region.

Rootly’s alert deduplication feature is specifically designed to eliminate exact duplicates, while alert grouping helps you see the bigger picture during a complex incident.

Beyond Deduplication: More Ways to Use Rootly AI

Eliminating noise is just the first step. Rootly’s AI capabilities extend far beyond deduplication to help teams resolve incidents faster and more efficiently. The platform includes a suite of intelligent tools that automate manual work and provide critical insights when they're needed most. You can get a complete overview of Rootly's AI features to see how it can enhance your entire incident lifecycle.

Using Rootly AI to Generate Draft Communication Templates

A critical part of incident response is keeping stakeholders informed. Using Rootly AI to generate draft communication templates streamlines this process. The AI analyzes incident data—such as the services impacted, the severity, and any notes from responders—to automatically draft clear and consistent status updates. This saves on-call engineers valuable time and mental energy, allowing them to focus on fixing the problem. This automation ensures communications are accurate and follow a consistent format, a key feature in modern incident management platforms [3].

Rootly AI-Generated Remediation Runbooks

When an incident strikes, knowing what to do next is crucial. Rootly AI-generated remediation runbooks help guide responders toward the fastest path to resolution. By analyzing the incident's context and comparing it to historical data from similar past incidents, Rootly AI can suggest specific action items or entire remediation plans. These AI-powered suggestions help standardize the response process and empower all team members, including junior engineers, to act decisively and effectively [4].

The Business Impact of AI-Powered Incident Management

Integrating Rootly's AI features into your incident management workflow delivers tangible business outcomes.

• Reduces Downtime Costs: By eliminating alert noise and suggesting next steps, Rootly helps teams reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). Faster resolutions directly cut down on the staggering costs of downtime, which can reach hundreds of billions of dollars annually for Global 2000 companies [8].
• Improves On-Call Health: Automating tedious tasks like drafting updates and filtering duplicate alerts prevents engineer burnout. This leads to a happier, healthier, and more effective on-call team.
• Streamlines Triage and Resolution: A clean, consolidated timeline for each incident gives responders a complete and accurate picture. This enables them to diagnose and mitigate an incident more quickly by ensuring all relevant data is in one place.

Conclusion: From Incident Chaos to Clarity with Rootly AI

Duplicate alerts and alert fatigue create chaos, slowing down response times and burning out teams. Rootly’s automatic deduplication provides an immediate and powerful solution, filtering out noise so your team can focus on what matters.

This feature is just one part of a comprehensive AI suite that assists with every phase of the incident lifecycle, from communication and remediation to reporting and learning. Rootly AI transforms incident management from a reactive, chaotic process into a streamlined, intelligent, and automated workflow that drives resilience.

Ready to silence the noise? Book a demo of Rootly today.

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