Rootly’s GitOps Integration for DevOps Workflows

Integrating incident management directly into your DevOps workflows is essential for building systems that are both resilient and efficient. When your team adopts a GitOps framework—where Git is the single source of truth for your infrastructure—it only makes sense for your incident response processes to follow suit. This article explains how Rootly’s integrations, particularly with tools like Terraform, enhance a GitOps-based workflow to create automated and resilient systems.

What is GitOps and Why is it Essential for DevOps?

GitOps is a set of practices that uses a Git repository as the one and only source of truth for managing infrastructure and application configurations [5]. It brings the same powerful tools that developers use for source code—like version control, peer reviews, and CI/CD automation—to the world of operations.

The core principles of GitOps are straightforward:

• A declarative description of your system. The desired state of your entire system is described in configuration files (for example, YAML or Terraform files) and stored in a Git repository.
• An automated process to maintain that state. A software agent continuously compares the live system to the state described in Git and automatically makes updates to ensure they match.

Adopting GitOps helps teams solve persistent problems like "configuration drift," where small, undocumented changes cause environments to become inconsistent over time. To be successful, it requires a well-defined repository structure and a clear branching strategy to isolate and test changes safely before they go live [1].

How does Rootly fit into a GitOps-based DevOps workflow?

Rootly completes the picture by bringing "incident management as code" to your GitOps workflow. While GitOps defines the desired state of your system, Rootly automates the response when the system's actual state deviates because of an incident.

With Rootly, your entire incident response framework—from runbooks and escalation policies to severities and custom fields—can be defined as code. This ensures your incident response processes are version-controlled, auditable, and consistently applied across your organization. Rootly acts as the central command center, connecting all the tools in your DevOps stack. You can explore Rootly's extensive list of integrations to see how it fits into your existing toolchain.

How can Rootly integrate with Terraform or Ansible for automated remediation?

Rootly connects with popular Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and configuration management tools to automate actions that resolve incidents quickly, freeing up your engineers from manual, repetitive tasks.

Managing Rootly with the Terraform Provider

The Rootly Terraform provider allows your team to define and manage your entire Rootly configuration as code. This means you can store your incident management setup in a Git repository, review any changes through pull requests, and apply them automatically with your CI/CD pipeline. By using the provider, you can manage critical resources like:

• Services and functionalities
• Incident severities and types
• Automated workflows and escalation policies
• Custom fields and forms

This approach ensures your incident response processes are managed with the same rigor and consistency as your infrastructure [2].

Importing Existing Configurations with Terraformer

For teams that already have a well-established Rootly instance, getting started with GitOps is easy. The Terraformer tool can scan your live Rootly environment and automatically generate the corresponding Terraform configuration files. This allows you to import your current setup into a GitOps workflow without having to rebuild everything from scratch, significantly speeding up adoption.

Triggering Ansible for Procedural Automation

While declarative tools like Terraform are perfect for defining an end state, some fixes require a specific sequence of steps. This is where a procedural tool like Ansible excels. A Rootly workflow can easily trigger an Ansible playbook via a webhook to perform specific tasks as part of an automated remediation plan, such as:

• Restarting a specific service or application.
• Clearing a cache.
• Applying a security patch.

This combination of declarative and procedural automation provides the flexibility needed to handle a wide range of incident scenarios.

What does a self-healing incident management setup with Rootly look like?

A "self-healing" system is one that can automatically detect, diagnose, and remediate issues with minimal human intervention. Rootly acts as the automation engine that makes this possible within your GitOps framework.

Here is what a typical self-healing workflow powered by Rootly looks like:

1. An alert from a monitoring tool like Datadog or Prometheus triggers the creation of a new incident in Rootly.
2. Rootly automatically executes a predefined workflow or runbook associated with that alert.
3. The workflow triggers an automated remediation action, such as running a terraform apply to revert a change or executing an Ansible playbook to restart a pod.
4. The system state is restored to the desired configuration. If the automation fails, the incident is automatically escalated to the appropriate on-call engineer for manual review.

Building this level of resilience is crucial, as even the largest DevOps platforms can suffer from downtime. A mid-year 2025 incident report noted that major platforms like GitHub and Azure DevOps experienced a combined 183 incidents, causing significant disruptions [4]. A self-healing system built with Rootly helps ensure your services remain available even when dependencies falter.

How can I design automated escalation rules in Rootly?

A key part of a successful automation strategy is knowing when to escalate an issue to a human. Rootly’s powerful workflow engine allows you to design condition-based escalation rules that ensure the right people are notified at the right time.

You can set up escalation triggers based on a variety of conditions, including:

• Incident severity: Automatically page the on-call engineer for any SEV1 incident.
• Incident duration: If a SEV2 incident is not resolved within 30 minutes, escalate to the team lead.
• Impacted service or functionality: Route incidents related to a specific microservice directly to the team that owns it.
• Failure of an automated workflow: If an automated remediation attempt fails, immediately page an engineer with the full context of what was attempted.

Best of all, these escalation policies can also be managed as code using the Rootly Terraform provider. This ensures your on-call logic is versioned, peer-reviewed, and consistently enforced across your entire organization.

Conclusion: Achieve Resilient and Consistent Incident Management with Rootly

By integrating Rootly into a GitOps workflow, your team can treat incident management as code. This modern approach leads to faster resolution times, reduces manual toil for engineers, and builds more resilient and auditable systems. With Rootly, your incident management processes can become just as reliable as your infrastructure code.

Ready to build a more automated and robust incident management practice? Explore Rootly’s comprehensive list of integrations and discover how you can transform your DevOps workflows today.

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