Why the Best Engineering Teams Run Incidents on Rootly

For modern SaaS companies, uptime isn't just a metric; it's a critical component of revenue, reputation, and customer trust. When services go down, the costs add up quickly. Unplanned outages for large companies can collectively cost around $400 billion every year [1]. While many tools can alert teams to a problem, the best engineering teams choose platforms that manage the entire incident lifecycle, from detection all the way to learning and prevention.

This article explores why top-tier engineering and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams are choosing Rootly over legacy systems. They understand that in today's complex tech environments, just getting a notification isn't enough to solve problems effectively.

The Soaring Costs of Inefficient Incident Management

Handling incidents poorly comes with a steep price that goes beyond just the technical fix. The financial and reputational damage can be significant, affecting a company's bottom line and its standing in the market.

Global 2000 companies lose an estimated $400 billion annually because of downtime, with consequences that spread throughout the business [2]. The impact is visible in hard numbers: a company's stock value can drop by an average of 2.5% after a downtime event. With 56% of these incidents being related to cybersecurity, the risks are both varied and constant [4]. For SaaS companies, this direct financial hit is made worse by hidden costs like losing customers and damaging the brand, which are much harder to recover from.

The Old Way: Why Alert-Centric Tools Like PagerDuty Fall Short

For a long time, the standard way to handle incidents was all about alerting. Tools like PagerDuty became popular because they are great for on-call management and sending notifications. This traditional approach focuses on one thing: getting the right person's attention when something breaks.

The Gaps in the Lifecycle

However, an alert is just the beginning of an incident. A model that only focuses on alerts leaves big gaps in the process, creating friction that slows down a solution.

• Manual Toil: Once an engineer gets an alert, they're often left to manually coordinate the response. This means doing tedious tasks like creating a Slack channel, inviting the right people, starting a video call, and updating tickets.
• Fragmented Communication: The response effort gets scattered across different tools like Slack, Jira, and email. Important information gets lost, leading to confusion and wasted time.
• Poor Learning Loop: After the incident is over, figuring out what happened and how to prevent it in the future is often pushed aside. This makes it hard to learn from mistakes, so the same problems happen again.

This frustrating process doesn't just slow down resolutions (increasing Mean Time to Resolution, or MTTR); it also leads to engineer burnout.

The Rootly Advantage: A Modern Platform for the Full Incident Lifecycle

The best engineering teams are moving past this outdated model. They're adopting solutions that automate and organize the entire incident process, turning chaos into a clear, repeatable system.

Rootly is a complete incident management platform built to handle the entire process from one place. It gives teams the tools they need for every stage, from detection and organization to resolution and learning from data.

1. Automate Toil and Focus on Resolution

The biggest time-waster during an incident is manual, repetitive work. Rootly's intelligent workflows get rid of these administrative tasks, letting engineers focus their brainpower on diagnosing and fixing the actual problem.

For example, a workflow can be set up to automatically:

• Create a dedicated Slack channel with a clear, consistent name.
• Invite the on-call engineer and other key team members.
• Start a video call for the team to collaborate.
• Create a Jira ticket with all the incident details already filled in.
• Post an update to your status page to keep customers informed.

By automating these steps, Rootly's workflows save valuable engineering time and make sure every incident is handled using a consistent, best-practice approach.

2. Centralize Communication Where Your Team Already Works

Switching between different apps is a major slowdown during a stressful incident. Rootly works as a command center right inside Slack, where your technical teams are already collaborating.

Instead of forcing users to jump between a notification app and a chat tool, Rootly lets responders manage the entire incident from one place. Using simple Slack commands, you can declare an incident, assign roles, run workflows, and talk to stakeholders. This keeps the incident channel as the single source of truth where all communication and data live.

3. Drive Continuous Improvement with Actionable Retrospectives

High-performing teams don't just fix problems; they learn from them. The 2023 State of DevOps Report shows that a focus on continuous improvement is what sets the best teams apart [7]. Rootly helps turn this idea into a reality.

After an incident is resolved, Rootly automatically creates a detailed timeline and fills out a retrospective (or post-mortem) with key data and discussions from the incident. This makes it easy to analyze what went wrong and, more importantly, create and track follow-up tasks to prevent it from happening again. By building a culture of learning, teams can achieve a 30% increase in organizational performance [6].

Incident Management Platform Comparison: Rootly vs. The Alternatives

Choosing the right tool is a big decision. A side-by-side incident management platform comparison shows that the best choice depends on what your team wants to achieve: Are you just trying to manage alerts, or are you trying to build a mature, reliable system? For a full breakdown of the top incident management tools for SaaS companies, our detailed comparison offers a clear overview.

Rootly vs. PagerDuty

These two platforms are often compared, but they are built for different jobs.

Feature

Rootly

PagerDuty

Primary Goal

End-to-end incident management.

Alerting and on-call scheduling. Some teams look for a PagerDuty alternative to handle this function.

Core Focus

Answering "How do we resolve and learn?"

Answering "Who should we notify?"

Role in Toolchain

The central hub that connects the entire toolchain (Slack, Jira, Datadog, PagerDuty, etc.).

An integration source for alerts.

While PagerDuty is excellent at its core job, many teams start looking for PagerDuty alternatives when they realize they need a more complete system. Rootly is that next step, building on top of alerts to manage the full response and learning cycle.

Rootly vs. Other Modern Platforms (e.g., incident.io)

Other Slack-native tools exist to help organize incident response. While they are an improvement over manual processes, Rootly stands out with its maturity and flexibility, especially for growing engineering teams that want to build a serious reliability strategy.

Rootly’s powerful workflow engine, customizable incident details, and deep analytics give teams the tools they need to build a truly mature process. As organizations grow, they need a platform that can adapt to their unique needs and provide the measurable data required to drive improvement. Our platform showdown article offers more detail on these key differences.

Conclusion: Elevate Your Engineering Team with Rootly

The best engineering teams know that incidents are more than just fires to put out; they are chances to learn and make systems stronger. They are moving from a reactive approach to a proactive one, building processes to manage incidents efficiently and prevent them from happening again.

While alert-focused tools like PagerDuty are still an important part of the tech stack, true reliability requires a comprehensive solution. Choosing Rootly is a strategic decision to invest in automation, collaboration, and continuous improvement—the proven pillars of a world-class engineering team.

Ready to see how Rootly can transform your incident management process? Book a demo or start your free trial today.

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