Rootly AI Guides Real‑Time Next Steps in Active Incidents

Managing a technical incident can feel chaotic and stressful. When something breaks, there's immense pressure to fix it quickly. This high-pressure environment can make it hard for response teams to think clearly, often leading to simple mistakes and longer downtimes. Rootly is an end-to-end incident management platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to bring order to this chaos. It acts like an expert co-pilot, providing real-time recommendations to guide teams through the response process smoothly and efficiently [1].

How does Rootly’s AI recommend next steps during active incidents?

Rootly AI's recommendations aren't just random guesses. They are based on a smart analysis of both your company's past incidents and what's happening in real-time. The AI looks at the specific details, or properties, of an active incident—like its type, how severe it is, and which services are affected. This allows it to offer guidance that is specific to the problem at hand. By using data instead of just gut feelings, Rootly ensures your team is always taking the most effective steps. You can learn more about how Rootly helps you manage all aspects of your incidents.

Leveraging Historical Incident Data

Imagine if you could learn from every past incident in your organization. Rootly AI does exactly that. It studies your incident history to find patterns, learning which actions, automated workflows (runbooks), and team members were most successful at fixing similar issues before. This allows the AI to suggest proven solutions, which reduces guesswork and helps your team consistently follow the best approach for every situation.

Conversational Guidance with "Ask Rootly AI"

During a stressful incident, responders need answers fast. The Ask Rootly AI feature acts as a helpful assistant right inside your team's Slack channel. Instead of digging through old documents or asking around, team members can ask direct questions and get instant, helpful answers based on the live incident.

Here are some examples of what you can ask:

• "What are the next steps for this incident?"
• "Can you summarize what has happened so far?"
• "Who is leading the technical response?"
• "Which services are currently impacted?"

This feature makes crucial information available to everyone, helping the entire team work together more effectively to resolve the problem.

Integrating with Dynamic Runbooks

Today's best incident response strategies use automation to handle repetitive tasks and ensure nothing is missed. Rootly's AI connects directly with your runbooks, which are like pre-planned sets of instructions. The AI can suggest and even automatically start tasks from these runbooks. These aren't just static checklists; they are dynamic workflows that the AI recommends based on how the incident is unfolding in real time [2]. For example, if a specific server goes down, the AI can suggest a runbook that automatically collects error logs and alerts the right person.

Proactive Incident Management with Rootly AI

Great incident management isn't just about reacting to problems quickly; it's also about preventing them from happening in the first place. Rootly AI helps your team get ahead of issues by offering proactive analysis and insights.

How can Rootly use AI to cluster and correlate recurring alerts?

Many engineering teams are flooded with notifications, making it easy to miss the important ones. This is often called "alert fatigue." Rootly AI solves this by automatically grouping related alerts from different monitoring tools into a single, organized incident. By pulling information from your various observability application integrations, Rootly gives responders a single, clear view of the problem's full scope. This cuts through the noise and helps the team focus on fixing the root cause instead of chasing down scattered symptoms.

Can Rootly use anomaly detection to forecast potential downtime?

While Rootly AI can't predict the future, it does provide a powerful form of trend analysis that works like an early warning system. By analyzing patterns from alerts and past incidents, the AI can spot fragile areas in your systems that cause frequent problems. By flagging services that are often involved in even minor incidents, Rootly helps your team prioritize preventive work. This forward-thinking approach is a key part of modern reliability engineering, a field explored at Rootly AI Labs, helping you fix underlying weaknesses before they cause major downtime [3].

Core AI Features Across the Incident Lifecycle

Rootly embeds AI into every stage of an incident, from the first alert to the final wrap-up meeting. These AI and intelligence features automate boring tasks, provide crucial insights, and help your team learn and improve.

From Incident Declaration to Resolution

Rootly AI supports your team from the moment an incident starts, with enterprise-grade features trusted by leading companies [4].

• Generated Incident Title: The AI automatically creates a clear and accurate title based on the initial alert data. This title can even update itself as more information becomes available.
• Incident Summarization: Anyone joining an incident late can get caught up in seconds. The AI provides a quick summary of what has happened, what's been done, and who is doing what.
• Mitigation and Resolution Summary: After the incident is fixed, the AI creates a short summary of the steps taken to solve it. This is perfect for keeping stakeholders informed and for future documentation.

Automating Post-Incident Processes

The work doesn't stop once the problem is fixed. Rootly AI also helps with the important post-incident phase, where the goal is to learn from what happened. The AI can help generate content for your retrospective (or post-mortem), identify factors that contributed to the problem, and suggest action items to prevent it from happening again. This speeds up the learning cycle, as detailed in the "Reflect" phase of incident response, ensuring valuable lessons lead to real improvements [5].

Conclusion: Building a Smarter, More Resilient Response Process

Rootly AI transforms incident management from a stressful, reactive scramble into a structured, data-driven process. By providing real-time guidance, automating tasks, and uncovering proactive insights, Rootly reduces the mental burden on your team. This leads to faster resolutions and a more stable, reliable system.

Rootly acts as a collaborative partner, empowering your team not only to fix issues faster but also to learn from every single incident. Implementing an AI-native solution like Rootly is a strategic move toward building a more resilient and efficient engineering organization.

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