Rootly Automates Incident Declaration & Comms From Alerts

When an incident occurs, manual response processes create delays, confusion, and communication gaps. The time wasted on declaring an incident, finding the right on-call engineer, and updating stakeholders is time that a critical system remains down. Rootly is an incident management platform built to solve these challenges by automating the entire incident lifecycle, starting from the initial alert.

How Does Rootly Automate Incident Declaration from Alerts?

Rootly’s effectiveness stems from its ability to ingest alerts from your entire toolchain and use the data within those alerts as triggers for automation. At its core are powerful workflows that transform manual checklists into repeatable, data-driven processes that execute in seconds, not minutes [1].

Centralizing and Triaging Incoming Alerts

Rootly acts as a central nervous system for all your alerts, consolidating signals from monitoring, observability, and ticketing platforms. It integrates with tools like PagerDuty, Datadog, and Zendesk, giving your teams a single, unified view of actionable alerts [2].

For signals that require investigation before a formal declaration, Rootly provides the "In Triage" feature. This allows teams to track a potential issue without the pressure and noise of a full-blown incident. The benefits are clear:

• Early Data Capture: All investigative actions and data are recorded from the start.
• Reduced Duplicate Efforts: Responders can immediately see that a potential issue is already under investigation.
• Minimized On-Call Fatigue: Engineers are protected from the fatigue of declaring formal incidents for false alarms or minor alerts.

Using Alert Workflows for Automatic Declaration

Alert Workflows are the engine that drives automated incident declaration in Rootly. These are configured to run specific tasks when an alert is created or updated in the platform [3]. The process is highly customizable and data-driven:

1. An alert arrives from an integrated tool, such as PagerDuty or Honeybadger.
2. The workflow evaluates pre-defined run conditions based on the alert's data payload, such as its source, priority level, or specific text.
3. If conditions are met, the workflow automatically declares a new incident in Rootly, initiating the entire response process.

While this automation is powerful, Rootly maintains flexibility. Teams can always create incidents manually through the web app or programmatically via the Rootly API for edge cases or unique situations.

How Can Rootly Integrate with PagerDuty for Faster Escalations?

Combining Rootly and PagerDuty creates a best-in-class solution for accelerating incident response and escalations. The integration establishes a seamless, bi-directional connection, ensuring that data is consistent across both platforms and that manual hand-offs are eliminated.

Key Features and Benefits

The PagerDuty integration provides a rich set of features designed to get the right experts involved faster:

• Synchronized Team Data: Automatically import PagerDuty services, escalation policies, and on-call schedules into Rootly.
• Instant On-Call Visibility: View who is on-call directly within Slack and automatically invite them to the incident channel.
• Automated Paging: Configure workflows to automatically page the correct on-call team based on the incident's severity, type, or other custom fields.
• Real-Time Status Sync: Keep incident status synchronized between Rootly and PagerDuty, so acknowledging an incident in one platform updates the other.

Setting Up the Automated Workflow

Configuring Rootly to react to PagerDuty events is a straightforward process. You establish a webhook in PagerDuty that sends event data (like incident.triggered or incident.acknowledged) to a Rootly endpoint.

From there, you can create an Alert Workflow in Rootly that listens for these specific PagerDuty alerts. When a PagerDuty incident is triggered, Rootly can automatically create a corresponding incident, assemble the response team in Slack, and attach relevant playbooks. To complete the cycle, workflows can be configured so that resolving an incident in Rootly automatically resolves it in PagerDuty, closing the loop and ensuring a single source of truth. You can learn more about creating incidents via PagerDuty.

How Does Rootly Automate Stakeholder Communication During Outages?

Keeping stakeholders informed during an incident is critical but often falls by the wayside when teams are focused on remediation. Rootly solves this with Incident Workflows, which automate communication tasks based on changes to an incident's data [4].

These workflows are triggered by changes in an incident's properties, most commonly its status (e.g., when it is created or moves from Investigating to Mitigated). By leveraging Rootly's fixed incident statuses as automation triggers, you can build a reliable and timely communication strategy. You can tailor these statuses and other incident fields in your Rootly configuration.

Automated Communication Examples

Here are a few examples of communication tasks that Rootly can fully automate, allowing your incident commander to focus on leading the response:

• Automatically creating a dedicated Slack channel (e.g., #inc-2025-451-api-degradation) for every new incident.
• Sending a summary of the incident to a broader stakeholder channel in Slack or Microsoft Teams.
• Reminding the incident commander to post an update to a public status page every 20 minutes for a SEV1 incident.
• Notifying executive and legal teams via email when a SEV0 incident affecting customer data is declared.
• Generating and assigning a Jira ticket for the post-incident review once an incident is resolved.

Expanding Automation Beyond PagerDuty

Rootly’s automation capabilities are not limited to a single tool. Its extensive integration ecosystem allows teams to build a unified response process regardless of where an issue originates in the tech stack.

• Application Performance Monitoring: An alert from Honeybadger signaling a spike in application errors can automatically trigger a Rootly incident. The alert passes rich diagnostic data directly into Rootly, giving responders immediate context without tool-switching [5].
• Data Infrastructure: Data teams can integrate Rootly with tools like Paradime to automatically create an incident when a critical dbt™ run fails. This ensures data quality issues are addressed with the same speed and process rigor as production service outages [6].

Conclusion: From Alert Chaos to Automated Control

By connecting your alert sources to a powerful automation engine, Rootly transforms incident management from a chaotic, manual process into a calm, controlled, and efficient practice. It accomplishes this by automating three key pillars of response:

1. Declaration: Automatically converting alerts from any tool into declared incidents based on their data.
2. Escalation: Integrating deeply with tools like PagerDuty to page the right people instantly.
3. Communication: Using changes in incident data to trigger timely and accurate updates for all stakeholders.

By embracing this level of automation, engineering teams can dramatically reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), minimize human error, and foster a culture of resilience and continuous improvement.

Ready to put your incident management on autopilot? Book a demo of Rootly to see how our automation can work for you.

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