Rootly, Prometheus & Grafana: Automate Your Response

Engineering teams often grapple with a high volume of alerts generated by disparate observability tools. While powerful open-source solutions like Prometheus excel at metrics collection and alerting, and Grafana provides rich data visualization, they primarily focus on identifying problems. The critical gap lies in automating the subsequent response, a process that frequently involves manual steps, context-switching, and slower Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR). This is where Rootly serves as a central command center, integrating with your monitoring stack to automate the entire incident response lifecycle. By connecting these tools, Rootly centralizes observability and transforms passive alerts into immediate, automated actions.

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

The most effective strategy for using Rootly with Prometheus and Grafana is to establish a seamless, automated workflow that connects alert detection directly to incident resolution. This approach transforms a passive monitoring system into an active, automated response engine, minimizing manual intervention and accelerating remediation.

Step 1: Centralize Alerts with the Prometheus Alertmanager Integration

The initial step is to connect Prometheus to Rootly. Prometheus's Alertmanager component can be configured to forward alert notifications to a unique Rootly webhook URL. By modifying the alert-manager.yml file with the provided webhook endpoint and secret, you ensure that every alert fired by Prometheus is securely ingested by Rootly.

This incoming alert payload can then trigger predefined workflows. Based on the alert's labels and annotations, Rootly can automatically create an incident, notify designated communication channels, or page the appropriate on-call responders. This direct Prometheus Alertmanager integration eliminates the delay between alert detection and response mobilization.

Step 2: Build Automated Incident Response Workflows

Once an alert is ingested from Prometheus, Rootly's workflow automation engine takes control. These workflows are highly customizable and can execute a series of orchestrated tasks based on the alert's context. Common automated actions include:

• Creating a dedicated Slack or Microsoft Teams channel for incident collaboration, inviting the necessary responders automatically.
• Paging the correct on-call engineer using native Rootly scheduling or through integrations with tools like PagerDuty.
• Enriching the incident with critical context, such as attaching a direct link to the specific Grafana dashboard that visualizes the problematic metric.
• Automatically generating a Jira ticket to track the incident and any follow-up actions, ensuring no remediation tasks are lost. This direct Rootly Jira integration streamlines project management from the moment an incident is declared.

Step 3: Manage the Entire Incident Lifecycle in One Place

This integrated setup allows teams to manage the complete incident lifecycle without leaving their primary communication client or the Rootly UI. Rootly functions as the single source of truth for collaboration, stakeholder communication, and post-incident analysis. All actions, communications, and timeline events are automatically captured, providing a complete audit trail. This data is invaluable for analytics, helping teams identify trends, generate retrospectives, and continuously improve their response processes. By centralizing these functions, you can effectively manage incidents from detection to resolution.

How does Rootly integrate with OpenTelemetry for unified observability?

OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a vendor-neutral, open-source standard for instrumenting, generating, and collecting telemetry data—namely traces, metrics, and logs. Its primary objective is to standardize data collection and break down silos between different observability tools, which is especially critical for understanding performance in complex microservice architectures [5].

The Challenge of Siloed Data

The traditional "three pillars" of observability—traces, logs, and metrics—are often stored and analyzed in separate systems. This separation creates data silos, hindering a holistic view of system health and complicating root cause analysis. True unified observability requires storing and analyzing these signals together to reveal their contextual relationships [8].

Rootly's Role as a Central Hub

While many platforms focus on collecting and storing OTel data, Rootly's strength lies in acting on the signals and alerts generated from that unified data. Rootly can ingest alerts from any OTel-compatible backend—such as Grafana, Datadog, or specialized platforms combining OTel with AI [7]—via its flexible Generic Webhook integration.

This capability allows Rootly to unify the response process, regardless of where the underlying observability data is stored or analyzed. When your unified observability platform detects an anomaly and generates an alert, Rootly translates that signal into an automated incident response workflow, ensuring that insights lead to immediate action.

Expanding Your Automated Response with Key Integrations

Rootly’s power extends far beyond Prometheus and Grafana by connecting to the entire software development and IT operations ecosystem. With a wide array of integrations, Rootly acts as the central nervous system for your technical operations.

Rootly Jira Integration for Seamless Project Management

The Rootly Jira integration is a cornerstone of effective incident management. Rootly automates the creation of Jira tickets for incidents, pre-populating them with critical information like severity, affected services, a summary of the incident, and a link back to the Rootly incident channel. Workflows can be configured to keep the Jira ticket status synchronized with the live incident status in Rootly, ensuring all stakeholders are consistently updated. This automation eliminates manual ticket creation, reduces the risk of human error, and guarantees that all follow-up actions and post-mortems are formally tracked.

Connecting to Your Entire Toolchain

Rootly’s role as a central hub is reinforced by its deep integrations with other critical tools across your stack:

• Development & CI/CD: Connect directly with platforms like Kubernetes, GitHub, and GitLab to pull relevant deployment information or trigger operational tasks.
• Communication: Native integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams serve as the command center for incident response.
• Alerting & On-Call: Seamlessly connect with PagerDuty and Opsgenie to manage on-call schedules and escalations.

For any in-house or specialized tools not covered by a pre-built integration, the robust Rootly API provides the endpoints needed to build custom connections and extend automation capabilities even further.

Conclusion: From Monitoring to Automated Resolution

The combination of Prometheus for metrics collection, Grafana for visualization, and Rootly for automated response creates a formidable, end-to-end incident management solution. This integrated stack empowers teams to move beyond passive monitoring and toward an active, rapid, and automated response posture. By doing so, organizations can significantly reduce MTTR, lessen the cognitive load on engineers, and enforce consistent, auditable incident processes.

Ready to see how Rootly can centralize your tools and automate your response? Explore how Rootly centralizes observability and transforms your incident management practice.

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