Rootly & Jira Integration: Auto‑Create Incident Tickets

During an incident, the last thing your team needs is more manual work. Administrative tasks like creating Jira tickets, updating stakeholders, and logging action items are slow, error-prone, and divert critical focus from resolving the issue. The Rootly Jira integration is a powerful solution that automates this entire process, streamlining the incident management lifecycle from declaration to resolution [1].

Why Integrate Rootly with Jira?

Integrating Rootly with Jira moves your team beyond manual processes, offering significant benefits that enhance efficiency and collaboration.

• Eliminate Toil: By automating Jira ticket creation, you free up engineers to concentrate on investigation and resolution instead of administrative busywork.
• Maintain a Single Source of Truth: A two-way sync ensures that updates in Rootly are reflected in Jira and vice versa. This keeps all stakeholders, from engineering to project management, on the same page.
• Improve Cross-Team Collaboration: The integration bridges the communication gap between technical teams using Rootly for incident response and other departments that rely on Jira for project tracking.
• Streamline Post-Incident Processes: Automatically creating Jira tickets for incidents and their corresponding action items makes follow-up tasks and retrospectives more efficient and easier to track.

Core Features of the Bidirectional Sync

The Rootly Jira integration enables a seamless, two-way flow of information, ensuring your systems are always synchronized. Key automation capabilities include:

• Automatically create a Jira issue when an incident is declared in Rootly.
• Automatically update a Jira issue when the corresponding Rootly incident is updated.
• Automatically create a Jira issue or subtask for action items generated in Rootly.
• Automatically declare an incident in Rootly from a new Jira issue.
• Automatically update an incident in Rootly when a linked Jira issue is updated.

This comprehensive Jira integration ensures that regardless of where an update is made, the information is consistent across both platforms.

Getting Started: Two Paths to Configuration

Rootly offers two methods for configuring the Jira integration, providing flexibility for teams with both straightforward and complex requirements.

The Easy Way: Smart Defaults for Quick Setup

For teams that need to get up and running quickly, Smart Defaults is the fastest path. This option is enabled out-of-the-box for new customers and is ideal for those with uncomplicated workflows.

With Smart Defaults, you can configure key settings like:

• Enable automatic Jira ticket creation for all new incidents.
• Set a default Project Key, Issue Type, and Issue Status.
• Define the ticket Title and Description using Liquid syntax (e.g., {{ incident.title }}).
• Specify a Default Assignee.
• Automatically bookmark the Jira ticket in the incident's Slack channel.

The Advanced Way: Custom Workflows for Full Control

For ultimate flexibility, Rootly's Workflows engine allows you to build complex, conditional automation rules. This method is best for teams that need to map custom fields, create tickets in different projects based on incident criteria, or manage intricate synchronization logic [2]. Workflows can handle both Rootly-to-Jira and Jira-to-Rootly automation, giving you full control over your incident management process.

How-To: Configure a Rootly-to-Jira Workflow

A Rootly to Jira Sync workflow is used when an action in Rootly, such as declaring an incident, needs to trigger an action in Jira.

Mapping Custom Fields

The Advanced tab in the workflow builder is where you can map custom Jira fields. You'll need to find the specific custom field ID in Jira. This allows you to map various field types, including text, single-select, multi-select, and user fields, ensuring data from Rootly populates the correct fields in Jira.

Creating Subtasks for Action Items

You can also automate the creation of Jira subtasks for Rootly action items. This is configured in the workflow by using the issuelinks payload to link the new subtask back to the parent incident ticket in Jira. This ensures all follow-up work is clearly tracked and associated with the original incident [3].

How-To: Configure a Jira-to-Rootly Workflow

A Jira-to-Rootly workflow is triggered when an event in Jira, like creating a new issue, needs to initiate an action in Rootly.

Listen for Jira Events

The first step is to configure a webhook in Jira that sends event data to a unique Rootly endpoint. Rootly ingests these webhook events as Alerts, which can then be used to trigger workflows.

Configure a Workflow

In Rootly, create a new workflow using the Alert trigger. You can set run conditions to filter for specific Jira events (e.g., event:jira:issue_created) or events from a particular project (e.g., project_key:RD1). This is done using JSON path syntax to parse the incoming alert payload.

Create or Update Incidents

Once the trigger is configured, you can add "Create Incident" or "Update Incident" actions. This allows you to dynamically map fields from the Jira issue to the Rootly incident. For example, you can set the Rootly incident severity based on the priority of the Jira issue, enabling a seamless Jira to Rootly Sync.

Rootly & Jira in the Broader Observability Ecosystem

How do you use Rootly with Prometheus and Grafana?

Prometheus, Grafana, and Rootly each play a distinct role in a modern monitoring and incident response stack. The best way to use them together is to automate the end-to-end flow from detection to tracking.

1. Prometheus collects metrics and detects an anomaly (e.g., a high error rate).
2. An alerting tool like Alertmanager fires an alert to Rootly.
3. Rootly automatically declares an incident, creates a Slack channel, and initiates an incident timeline.
4. The Rootly Jira integration automatically creates a corresponding Jira ticket for tracking and follow-up.

This end-to-end flow connects observability with action, closing the loop from detection to remediation.

How does Rootly integrate with OpenTelemetry?

OpenTelemetry (OTel) provides a standardized way to generate and collect telemetry data, including traces, metrics, and logs. Rootly integrates with OpenTelemetry by working with any observability platform that consumes OTel data, creating a unified observability pipeline.

When a monitoring tool powered by OTel generates an alert, it is sent to Rootly. From there, Rootly kicks off the entire incident response process, including the automated creation of a Jira ticket. This ensures that signals from your systems are immediately converted into trackable work.

Conclusion: A Seamless Incident Management Experience

The Rootly Jira integration is designed to eliminate manual toil, allowing your teams to focus on what matters most: resolving incidents. Whether you choose the simple setup of Smart Defaults or the power of custom Workflows, the integration adapts to your team's processes.

By connecting Rootly and Jira, you can streamline incident management, reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), and ensure all follow-up work is comprehensively tracked. Get started today to build a more efficient and automated incident response lifecycle [4].

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