Rootly + OpenTelemetry: Unified Observability Made Simple

Engineering teams are often overwhelmed by a high volume of alerts from various observability tools. While powerful open-source solutions like Prometheus excel at collecting metrics and Grafana provides brilliant visualizations, their primary function is to identify problems, not automate the response. This gap can lead to manual toil and slower resolutions. Rootly bridges this divide, acting as a central command center that integrates with your monitoring stack to automate the entire incident response lifecycle.

What’s the best way to use Rootly alongside Prometheus and Grafana?

The most effective strategy is to establish a seamless, automated workflow that connects alert detection directly to incident resolution. This approach transforms a passive monitoring system that only flags issues into an active, automated response engine. By doing so, you can minimize manual intervention for engineers and accelerate remediation.

Step 1: Centralize Alerts with the Prometheus Alertmanager Integration

The first step is to connect your Prometheus monitoring environment to Rootly. The Prometheus Alertmanager component can be configured to forward alerts to a unique Rootly webhook URL. This is accomplished by modifying the alert-manager.yml file with the specific webhook endpoint and secret. This connection ensures every alert from Prometheus is securely ingested by Rootly, which can then trigger your predefined workflows. For a complete guide, you can refer to the Prometheus Alertmanager documentation.

Step 2: Build Automated Incident Response Workflows

Once an alert is ingested, Rootly's workflow automation engine takes over. You can build highly customizable workflows that execute an orchestrated sequence of tasks based on the alert's context, such as its severity or the affected service.

Common automated actions include:

• Creating a dedicated Slack or Microsoft Teams channel and inviting the correct responders.
• Paging the on-call engineer via Rootly's native scheduling or integrations with tools like PagerDuty.
• Enriching the incident with vital context, like a direct link to a relevant Grafana dashboard for immediate visualization.
• Automatically generating a Jira ticket to track the incident, ensuring no follow-up tasks are lost.

The Rootly Jira integration is a critical part of streamlining project management from the moment an incident begins. With a Rootly to Jira sync, you guarantee that incident details are consistently mirrored for tracking and post-incident review.

Step 3: Manage the Entire Incident Lifecycle in One Place

Rootly serves as the single source of truth for collaboration, communication, and post-incident analysis. All actions, communications, and timeline events are automatically captured, creating a complete and immutable audit trail. This rich incident data is invaluable for analytics, helping teams identify trends, measure key metrics, and continuously improve their response processes.

How does Rootly integrate with OpenTelemetry for unified observability?

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-neutral, open-source standard for instrumenting applications to collect telemetry data—namely traces, metrics, and logs. Its primary goal is to standardize data collection from all your services, helping to break down the data silos common in complex microservice architectures.

The Challenge of Siloed Data

Traditionally, the "three pillars" of observability—traces, logs, and metrics—are often stored and managed in separate, specialized systems. This separation creates data silos, which hinder a holistic view of system health and complicate root cause analysis during an incident. Engineers are frequently forced to manually jump between different tools to correlate information, a common pain point that slows down investigation and resolution [6].

Rootly's Role as a Central Hub for Action

Rootly's strength is not in collecting raw telemetry data but in acting on the signals and alerts generated from your unified OTel data. Rootly unifies the response.

Rootly can ingest alerts from any OTel-compatible backend observability platform (such as Grafana, Datadog, or Honeycomb) using its flexible Generic Webhook integration. This capability allows Rootly to translate the insights generated from your observability platforms into immediate, automated, and consistent action, ensuring every critical signal triggers a structured response.

Expanding Your Automated Response with Key Integrations

Rootly's power extends beyond Prometheus and Grafana by connecting to your entire software development and IT operations ecosystem. It acts as the central nervous system for technical operations through its wide array of integrations, allowing you to embed it into your existing tech stack [2].

Rootly Jira Integration for Seamless Project Management

The Rootly Jira integration is a cornerstone of effective incident management. This bidirectional sync is a powerful automation tool that streamlines workflows.

• Automatically creates Jira tickets for incidents, ensuring follow-up work is never missed.
• Pre-populates tickets with critical information like incident severity, affected services, and a summary.
• Keeps Jira and Rootly in sync, so that status updates and resolutions are reflected in both systems.

This automation eliminates manual ticket creation, reduces the risk of human error, and ensures all follow-up actions are formally tracked. You can find our official app on the Atlassian Marketplace [4] and get more details on setup in our Jira documentation.

Connecting to Your Entire Toolchain

Rootly reinforces its role as a central hub by offering deep integrations with other critical tools across your workflow.

• Development & CI/CD: Connect with Kubernetes, GitHub, and GitLab to pull relevant deployment information and link incident tasks to code changes.
• Communication: Use Slack and Microsoft Teams as your incident command center to run commands, get updates, and manage the entire lifecycle without leaving your chat application.
• Alerting & On-Call: Integrate with PagerDuty and Opsgenie to streamline escalations and ensure the right people are notified at the right time.

For any specialized or in-house tools, the robust Rootly API allows you to build custom connections and extend automation to every corner of your technical environment.

Conclusion: From Monitoring to Automated Resolution

By combining Prometheus for metrics, Grafana for visualization, and Rootly for automated response, teams can create a powerful, end-to-end incident management solution. This integrated stack empowers organizations to move from a passive monitoring posture to an active, automated response model.

The key benefits are clear: significantly reduced Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), less cognitive load on engineers, and consistent, auditable incident processes that drive continuous improvement.

Explore how Rootly, Prometheus & Grafana: Automate Your Response can centralize your tools and transform your incident management practice.

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