.avif)
.png){kind=icon}
.png){kind=icon}
Chaos Engineering is a critical practice for Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams building resilient systems. It involves intentionally injecting failures to test system behavior. The primary challenge is that chaos experiments can trigger real incidents requiring immediate, structured management.
Integrating chaos engineering tools with an incident management platform like Rootly creates a closed-loop system for testing, learning, and improving reliability. This integration automates the response process, which is key to reducing Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) for both planned and unplanned incidents. An AI-powered platform like Rootly can help teams resolve incidents up to 80% faster [1].
What is Chaos Engineering?
Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a system to build confidence in its ability to withstand turbulent and unexpected conditions in production. Its purpose is to proactively identify and fix system weaknesses before they cause widespread outages that affect end-users.
Foundational tools like Chaos Monkey, developed by Netflix, demonstrated the value of this practice. Today, Chaos Engineering is a core component of any modern SRE strategy focused on achieving high reliability [2].
The Challenge: Managing Incidents Triggered by Chaos Experiments
A successful chaos experiment is one that correctly triggers alerts and, in some cases, a full incident response, validating your monitoring systems. However, manually managing these experiment-induced incidents creates significant operational overhead, from creating communication channels to paging responders.
This manual process carries the risk that a chaos experiment can escalate into a genuine, customer-impacting outage if not managed efficiently. This problem is often worsened by a high volume of alerts from siloed tools, which makes it difficult to centralize observability and maintain control.
How Rootly's Integration Streamlines Chaos Engineering Workflows
Rootly acts as the central command center, providing a single, consistent workflow for incidents, whether they originate from real-world failures or planned chaos experiments.
Automated Incident Response for Planned Chaos
When Rootly is integrated with a chaos engineering tool, the incident workflow becomes automated:
- A chaos experiment is initiated (e.g., terminating a pod with LitmusChaos).
- The system generates an alert, which Rootly ingests.
- Rootly automatically triggers a predefined incident workflow, which can:
- Create a dedicated Slack or Microsoft Teams channel.
- Page the responsible SRE team.
- Pull in context from monitoring tools like Datadog.
- Generate a Jira ticket to document the experiment.
This level of automation is made possible by Rootly's extensive ecosystem of integrations with tools like Splunk, Datadog, and Grafana.
Centralizing Data and Learning from Experiments
Rootly consolidates all event data, communications, and action items from a chaos-induced incident into a single, searchable timeline. This centralized data is invaluable for conducting efficient post-mortems and retrospectives.
This process helps turn findings from chaos experiments into actionable improvements, fostering a culture of continuous learning and system resilience [3]. Rootly's AI features accelerate this by automatically generating incident summaries, freeing up your team to focus on remediation.
Integrating Rootly with Popular Chaos Engineering Tools
By connecting Rootly with tools like LitmusChaos and Gremlin, you can create a powerful, automated workflow for testing reliability with Chaos Monkey-style experiments. This addresses the need for sre chaos experiments integrated with rootly.
Rootly and LitmusChaos
LitmusChaos is an open-source chaos engineering framework for Kubernetes [4]. You can integrate LitmusChaos with Rootly by configuring it to send alerts via webhook when a chaos experiment runs [5]. Rootly's Generic Webhook feature ingests these alerts to trigger incident workflows automatically. This allows you to schedule a chaos experiment in Litmus and have Rootly manage the entire incident lifecycle without manual intervention [6].
Rootly and Gremlin
Gremlin is a commercial "Failure-as-a-Service" platform for enterprise-grade chaos engineering. The rootly chaos engineering integration gremlin litmus pattern is straightforward: Gremlin executes an attack, monitoring tools detect the resulting service degradation, and an alert is sent to Rootly. This alert kicks off the automated incident response process. By using Rootly to centralize data from tools like Datadog and Jira, you gain a complete picture of the experiment's impact within a single incident timeline [1].
Custom Integrations with Rootly's API
For teams using custom-built chaos tools or scripts, Rootly’s API provides the flexibility to create bespoke integrations. The Rootly API enables custom automations, allowing teams to programmatically declare incidents, add context, and trigger specific workflows directly from their chaos testing scripts.
The Result: Faster MTTR and More Resilient Systems
Integrating chaos engineering with Rootly delivers several key benefits:
- Reduced MTTR: Automation standardizes the response to chaos-induced incidents, allowing teams to validate their runbooks and reduce resolution time.
- Improved System Reliability: The tight feedback loop between proactive testing (chaos) and reactive management (Rootly) enables teams to find and remediate vulnerabilities faster.
- Scalable Chaos Engineering: Automating incident management removes manual toil, making it feasible for SRE teams to run more tests more frequently.
All Rootly integrations are built with enterprise-grade security, including end-to-end encryption, ensuring you can test and respond with confidence.
Conclusion
Integrating chaos engineering with Rootly transforms the practice from a manual, high-risk exercise into a safe, automated, and scalable strategy for building resilience. It turns experiments into structured learning opportunities that directly improve system reliability.
For SRE and platform engineering teams dedicated to achieving higher levels of reliability, Rootly is the essential control plane. It bridges the gap between proactive testing and reactive incident management, creating a more reliable future for your services.
Ready to power your SRE chaos experiments? Book a demo to see Rootly in action.