Rootly: Automate Datadog Alerts to Slack Incidents

In a modern tech stack, alerts from observability platforms like Datadog are essential, but they can quickly become overwhelming. When critical notifications get lost in the noise, response times suffer. Manually creating incidents from these alerts is a slow, error-prone process that pulls engineers away from solving the actual problem. This manual gap between detection and response is where incidents escalate and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) grows.

Rootly is the definitive solution to this challenge. It bridges the gap between Datadog alerts and real-time incident response in Slack, empowering your team with automated, streamlined workflows. Instead of drowning in alerts, you can instantly turn critical signals into actionable incidents and start collaborating immediately.

Why Integrate Datadog with Slack Using Rootly?

Connecting Datadog directly to a Slack channel is a common first step, but it often just moves the noise from one platform to another. A flood of raw alerts without context or prioritization can lead to alert fatigue, causing teams to ignore important notifications. Rootly acts as an intelligent layer between your tools, transforming noisy alerts into structured, actionable incidents.

The primary benefits of using Rootly to supercharge your Datadog and Slack integration include:

• Automated Incident Creation: Instantly and automatically convert critical Datadog alerts into formal incidents within Rootly. This eliminates time-consuming manual steps and ensures that every important issue is tracked from the start.
• Centralized Command Center: Manage the entire incident lifecycle—from declaration to resolution and postmortem—directly within Slack [2]. With Rootly, your Slack workspace becomes a powerful command center, so your team doesn't need to switch contexts between different tools.
• Reduced Alert Fatigue: Leverage powerful Rootly features like alert deduplication and grouping to bundle related alerts from the same underlying issue. This prevents responders from being overwhelmed by notification storms and helps them focus on the root cause. You can learn more about how Rootly helps manage incoming alerts.
• Seamless Collaboration: When an incident is created, Rootly automatically spins up a dedicated incident channel in Slack, invites the right on-call responders, and provides all the necessary context from the Datadog alert to start troubleshooting immediately.

Step-by-Step Guide: How to Automate Datadog Alerts into Slack Incidents

You can absolutely automate incident creation from Datadog alerts, and Rootly makes it simple. By connecting Datadog to Rootly, you can build powerful workflows that trigger incidents in Slack based on the severity and content of an alert. Here's how to set it up.

Step 1: Install the Rootly-Datadog Integration

The first step is to connect your Rootly and Datadog accounts. This requires Admin or Owner roles in both platforms to ensure you have the necessary permissions. The setup process involves creating API and Application keys in your Datadog account and securely adding them to your Rootly integration settings.

For a detailed walkthrough, follow our official installation guide, which will have you connected in minutes.

Step 2: Configure a Datadog Webhook for Rootly

Datadog uses webhooks to send alert data to external platforms like Rootly. You'll need to configure a webhook in Datadog to point to your Rootly instance.

Follow these steps within the Datadog platform:

1. Navigate to Integrations > Webhooks.
2. Create a new webhook and give it a descriptive name, such as "Rootly Alerts".
3. Paste your unique Rootly webhook URL, which you can find in the Datadog integration settings within the Rootly UI.
4. Copy the required JSON payload and paste it into the Payload field. This ensures all necessary alert data is sent to Rootly.
5. For secure authentication, add your secret token in the Custom Header section.

Our documentation provides the specific JSON payload and more detailed instructions for configuring Datadog alerts.

Step 3: Attach the Webhook to a Datadog Monitor

With the webhook created, you now need to link it to the specific Datadog monitors that should trigger actions in Rootly.

To do this, edit an existing monitor or create a new one. In the "Notify your team" section of the monitor configuration, add your new webhook using the syntax @webhook-your-webhook-name. We highly recommend using the Test Notifications feature to confirm that a test alert appears correctly on your Rootly Alerts page.

Step 4: Automate Incident Creation in Slack

Once alerts are flowing from Datadog into Rootly, the final step is to automate the incident response workflow. Inside Rootly, you can create powerful workflows that define exactly what happens when a specific alert is received.

For example, you can build a workflow that says: "When a Datadog alert is received with a 'critical' priority, automatically create an incident." This workflow can be configured to:

• Create a new, dedicated Slack channel (e.g., #inc-2025-10-26-api-high-latency).
• Post a summary of the Datadog alert directly in the channel for immediate context.
• Invite the on-call responders or relevant teams to the channel automatically.

This level of automation ensures that your team can begin collaboration and resolution without delay. You can explore all the ways to manage incidents through our powerful Slack interface.

A Centralized and Secure Incident Response Hub

Rootly’s value extends far beyond a single integration. It serves as a central hub for your entire incident response ecosystem, ensuring your workflows are both unified and secure.

Beyond Datadog: A Single Workflow for All Tools

Rootly centralizes multiple observability tools into one workflow, unifying alerts from a wide range of sources, not just Datadog. We offer native integrations for popular observability and monitoring tools like PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Sentry, and Splunk On-Call. Furthermore, Rootly's generic webhook capabilities allow you to integrate with almost any tool that can send an alert, giving you a single pane of glass for all your monitoring signals. The Rootly platform offers a comprehensive overview of its Datadog integration and its place in your toolchain.

Enterprise-Grade Security and Permissions

Rootly supports large enterprise integrations securely. We understand that security is non-negotiable, especially for large organizations. Our integration with Slack is built on the principle of least privilege, requesting only the necessary bot scopes to function, such as creating channels, sending messages, and adding bookmarks.

For organizations using Slack Enterprise Grid, Rootly offers enhanced support, allowing for secure and streamlined installation at the organization level rather than on a per-workspace basis. You can review a detailed list of permissions and security features on our Slack integration page.

Real-World Impact: Proactive Monitoring and Automation

The benefits of this integration are tangible. For instance, a cloud engineer recently shared their experience automating Slack alerts with Datadog to monitor critical performance metrics like CPU and memory utilization [8]. By setting up automated, real-time notifications, their team shifted from a reactive to a proactive observability posture.

The outcome was clear: faster team collaboration, reduced human error, and a more resilient infrastructure. This is the power of turning monitoring data into automated action.

Conclusion: From Alert Noise to Actionable Insights

Integrating Datadog with Slack via Rootly does more than just connect two tools—it transforms a noisy, chaotic alert feed into a structured, automated, and efficient incident response process. This powerful automation frees up valuable engineering time, drives down MTTR, and fosters a culture of seamless collaboration directly within Slack.

Ready to unlock the full potential of your monitoring stack? Connect your tools and start building streamlined workflows with Rootly today. You can also explore third-party platforms like n8n to discover even more ways to automate workflows between Datadog and Rootly [3].

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