Rootly: Automated Escalation & Key DevOps Integrations

Rootly is an incident management platform that serves as a central hub for your team, automating and simplifying how you handle technical issues. In today's fast-paced DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) environments, automation is essential. It helps lower Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)—the average time it takes to fix a problem—and eliminates the repetitive manual tasks that lead to team burnout. By integrating seamlessly with your existing DevOps tools, Rootly empowers automated escalation, remediation, and even self-healing systems.

How to Design Automated Escalation Rules in Rootly

Automated escalation is critical for ensuring that when an incident happens, the right people are notified at the right time without anyone having to manually chase them down. This process helps reduce alert fatigue by filtering out noise and speeds up response times by getting the right experts involved immediately.

Defining Escalation Triggers and Conditions

The first step in automating an escalation is deciding what events should set it off. In Rootly, you can create highly specific rules based on the details of an incident.

• Incident severity level: You can set a rule to automatically escalate all high-severity incidents (e.g., SEV1) to senior engineers or leadership.
• The specific service affected: If an incident impacts a critical, revenue-generating service, you can route it directly to a specialized team.
• The source of the alert: A critical alert from a core monitoring tool like Datadog might trigger a more urgent escalation path than a warning from a less vital system.
• Time-based triggers: You can configure rules to escalate an incident if it’s not acknowledged within 10 minutes or remains unresolved for over an hour.

Building Escalation Paths

Once you've defined your triggers, you can build multi-level escalation paths to guarantee no incident goes unnoticed. A typical escalation path in Rootly could look like this:

1. Level 1: Notify the primary on-call engineer for the affected service using an integrated tool like PagerDuty or Opsgenie.
2. Level 2: If the incident isn't acknowledged within a set time, like 10 minutes, automatically escalate it to the secondary on-call engineer and the team lead.
3. Level 3: If there's still no response, escalate further to the Head of Engineering and post an automated update in a leadership-focused communication channel.

What Does a Self-Healing Incident Management Setup with Rootly Look Like?

In IT, "self-healing" refers to a system's ability to automatically detect, diagnose, and resolve issues without human intervention. Rootly acts as the central orchestrator, connecting the tools that detect problems with the tools that can fix them, making self-healing a practical reality.

Step 1: Automated Detection and Triage

A self-healing process starts with solid monitoring and alerting. Rootly integrates with observability platforms like Datadog, New Relic, and Google Cloud Monitoring to ingest alerts. As soon as an alert comes in, Rootly can automatically:

• Create a new incident.
• Assign the correct severity level based on the alert data.
• Spin up a dedicated Slack or Microsoft Teams channel.
• Pull in relevant monitoring dashboards and troubleshooting runbooks.

Step 2: Triggering Automated Remediation Workflows

After an incident is declared, Rootly's workflow engine can kick off automated remediation actions. These actions can range from running simple scripts to executing complex infrastructure changes with configuration management tools. The goal is to build an environment that can fix itself, a key objective for teams focused on resilient automation [8].

Key DevOps Integrations for Automated Remediation

Rootly’s power comes from its flexible, integration-first approach. The platform is designed to be compatible with the tools your team already uses, creating a unified command center for your entire DevOps toolchain [5]. This is especially powerful for automated remediation, where integrations with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and configuration management tools unlock incredible capabilities.

How can Rootly integrate with Terraform for automated remediation?

Rootly’s integration with Terraform lets your team manage its incident management configuration as code. Using the official Rootly Terraform Provider, you can define resources like services, incident severities, and workflow rules directly in your code [1]. This ensures your incident response processes are version-controlled, repeatable, and always aligned with your infrastructure.

For teams looking to adopt an IaC approach, the Terraformer tool can scan an existing Rootly setup and automatically generate the corresponding Terraform configuration files, making the transition seamless [2]. To ensure this works effectively at scale, it's crucial to follow best practices for structuring Terraform configurations [3].

How can Rootly integrate with Ansible for automated remediation?

Rootly can trigger Ansible playbooks as a step in any workflow, letting you automate hands-on remediation tasks. For instance, when Rootly detects a specific type of incident, it can automatically run a playbook to:

• Restart a crashed service.
• Clear a problematic cache.
• Apply an urgent security patch.
• Provision additional resources to handle a traffic spike.

This fits perfectly with the concept of Event-Driven Ansible, where an incident in Rootly acts as the "event" that triggers a remediation playbook [6]. For more advanced scenarios, Ansible can be paired with AIOps to help automate root cause analysis and make remediation even smarter [7].

Can Rootly trigger Kubernetes rollbacks automatically?

Yes, Rootly can orchestrate Kubernetes rollbacks as part of an automated workflow. This is a classic example of a self-healing action that shields your users from the impact of a faulty deployment. Here’s how it works:

1. A monitoring tool detects a spike in errors right after a new application version is deployed.
2. An alert is sent to Rootly, which automatically declares a high-severity incident.
3. A pre-configured Rootly workflow triggers, which runs a script or sends a webhook to a tool like ArgoCD or the Kubernetes API.
4. This action executes a command like kubectl rollout undo deployment/your-deployment-name to revert the application to its last stable version.

This entire process can happen automatically in minutes, minimizing downtime before most users even notice there was a problem.

What are the most useful Rootly integrations for DevOps teams?

While remediation tools are crucial, a complete incident response process relies on a whole ecosystem of connected tools. Rootly offers a wide array of integrations across key categories like alerting, communication, and project management to support the entire incident lifecycle [4].

Alerting and Observability Tools

• Key Integrations: PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Datadog, Grafana, New Relic.
• Their Role: These tools are the "eyes and ears" of your systems. They detect problems and send alerts to Rootly to automatically create incidents.

Communication and Collaboration Tools

• Key Integrations: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet.
• Their Role: Rootly uses these tools to keep everyone synchronized. It automatically creates incident channels, invites the right responders, and posts status updates so all stakeholders stay informed.

Project Management and Ticketing Tools

• Key Integrations: Jira, Asana, Shortcut.
• Their Role: An incident isn't truly resolved until you learn from it. Rootly automates the creation of tickets for post-incident reviews and action items, ensuring follow-up work is tracked and completed.

Conclusion

Rootly functions as the automated command center for your incident response, connecting your entire toolchain into a single, cohesive system. By integrating with essential DevOps tools like Terraform, Ansible, and Kubernetes, Rootly delivers powerful automated escalation and remediation. This integrated approach helps teams build more resilient, self-healing systems, reduce manual toil, and resolve incidents faster than ever before.

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