Rootly Auto-Tags Incidents with Service Ownership Metadata

During an incident, one of the most pressing challenges is quickly and accurately identifying who owns the affected service. Manual processes for looking up ownership and tagging incidents are often slow, prone to human error, and can significantly delay resolution. This manual toil not only increases Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) but also pulls valuable engineers away from solving the actual problem.

Rootly is an incident management platform that automates this crucial step by connecting service ownership data directly to the incident response process. By establishing a single source of truth for your services, Rootly ensures that the right people are engaged the moment an incident is declared [7].

Can Rootly Automatically Tag Incidents with Service Ownership Metadata?

Yes, Rootly can automatically tag incidents with service ownership metadata by integrating directly with your service catalog. This capability is central to modern, automated incident management.

The core concept is simple yet powerful: Rootly uses a service catalog, such as Cortex, as the single source of truth for service ownership. When an alert triggers an incident, Rootly queries this data to automatically associate the incident with the correct service and its designated owner. This eliminates manual guesswork, reduces Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA), and ensures the right responders are engaged immediately, preventing unnecessary delays and confusion.

How Rootly Automates Service Ownership Tagging with Cortex

The integration between Rootly and Cortex is a prime example of automated service ownership tagging in action. By combining Cortex's comprehensive service catalog with Rootly's powerful workflow engine, teams can build a fully automated incident response process.

Using Cortex as the Single Source of Truth

Cortex serves as an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) that helps engineering teams maintain a detailed and up-to-date service catalog. This catalog includes critical metadata such as service names, descriptions, dependencies, and ownership information.

The integration is bidirectional, allowing Rootly to import the entire service catalog from Cortex. This sync keeps Rootly's incident data perfectly aligned with your organization's service landscape. With the in-depth service insights from Cortex powering Rootly's automated incident management, your team can be confident that every incident is routed correctly.

Triggering Automation with Workflows

Rootly's Alert Workflows are the engine behind this automation. These configurable workflows listen for incoming alerts and execute a series of predefined actions. The process looks like this:

1. An alert is received in Rootly from a monitoring tool like Datadog, PagerDuty, or Grafana.
2. An Alert Workflow is triggered based on conditions defined in the incoming alert's payload (for example, the service name).
3. The workflow cross-references the affected service with the ownership data synced from Cortex.
4. Rootly automatically creates an incident, tags it with the correct service and owner, creates a dedicated Slack channel, and pages the appropriate team via PagerDuty or Opsgenie.

This entire sequence happens in seconds, without any human intervention.

How Can Rootly Automate Repetitive SRE Workflows?

Beyond service ownership tagging, Rootly helps automate many other time-consuming and repetitive Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) workflows. This automation frees up engineers to focus on high-value tasks like diagnosing the root cause and building more resilient systems.

Auto-Declaring Incidents from Alerts

With Alert Workflows, you can configure run conditions based on alert source, severity, or payload content to automatically declare an incident. For example, a PagerDuty alert with a "high" urgency can be set to automatically create a SEV1 incident in Rootly, using predefined incident types [5] [1]. This automation can also create a dedicated Slack channel, invite the designated on-call responders, and start a video conference bridge.

Streamlining On-Call and Responder Management

Identifying and assembling the right response team is a critical, time-sensitive task. Rootly automates this process by integrating with on-call management tools. For example, the PagerDuty integration allows Rootly to automatically page the correct on-call person, escalation policy, or specific user based on the affected service. This direct line to the right expert expedites team assembly and ensures that incident response begins without delay.

Leveraging AI for Incident Communications

Rootly's AI capabilities further reduce the manual toil associated with incident management. These features help streamline communication and keep stakeholders informed.

• AI-Generated Titles: Rootly AI can analyze alert data to automatically generate a clear and concise incident title, saving responders from having to craft one manually [2].
• Real-Time Summaries: During an incident, the incident commander can use Rootly AI to create real-time summaries for stakeholders, ensuring everyone stays informed without distracting the response team [3].

What are the Most Useful Rootly Integrations for DevOps Teams?

Rootly's extensive integration ecosystem allows DevOps and SRE teams to connect their entire toolchain into a unified incident management platform.

Service Catalogs (e.g., Cortex)

As discussed, integrating with a service catalog is foundational for automating ownership and routing. The Cortex integration provides a unified view of services, powers automated incident routing, and even allows teams to view incident data directly within the Cortex portal.

Issue & Project Management (e.g., Jira, ServiceNow)

Tracking post-incident follow-up work is essential for continuous improvement. Integrations with tools like Jira and ServiceNow allow Rootly to automatically create action items, link them back to the original incident, and ensure that valuable learnings aren't lost. This closes the loop between response and remediation.

Alerting, Observability, and APM

Rootly integrates with the entire observability stack, including leading tools like PagerDuty, Datadog, Grafana, New Relic, and Splunk. These integrations allow Rootly to centralize alerts from various sources and act as the single pane of glass for triggering automated incident response. You can explore the full list of supported integrations via Rootly's API documentation.

Conclusion

Automating service ownership tagging is a critical first step in modernizing incident management. It eliminates manual errors, reduces response times, and ensures the right experts are engaged from the start. Rootly achieves this through powerful integrations with service catalogs like Cortex and a flexible workflow engine that can be customized to your team's needs.

This automation extends far beyond simple tagging, enabling teams to automate the entire incident lifecycle—from declaration and communication to resolution and learning. By offloading repetitive tasks, Rootly frees up your engineers to focus on what they do best: building and maintaining resilient, high-performing systems.

To see how Rootly can help your team automate incident management, book a demo today.

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