Rootly

Profile

Rootly is an enterprise-grade, AI-powered incident management and on-call platform that unifies incident response workflows within Slack and Microsoft Teams. Founded in 2020 by Quentin Rousseau and JJ Tang, the platform serves hundreds of organizations including NVIDIA, Figma, LinkedIn, and Canva, having raised $15 million in funding. Rootly addresses the fundamental challenge of fragmented incident response by creating a centralized incident command center directly within communication tools teams already use, automating repetitive coordination tasks, maintaining comprehensive audit trails, and providing data-driven insights. The platform operates as a SaaS application hosted on AWS infrastructure, eliminating the need for organizations to deploy or manage incident management infrastructure themselves.

Focus

Rootly solves the coordination challenge that occurs when systems fail and teams scatter across multiple tools—Slack for communication, PagerDuty for on-call scheduling, Jira for task tracking, and monitoring dashboards for diagnostics. This fragmentation creates inefficiency, lost context, and repeated manual work during critical incidents when responders waste time on administrative tasks rather than resolution. The platform consolidates the entire incident lifecycle into unified workflows accessible through existing chat interfaces, automating mechanical aspects like channel creation, responder notification, and stakeholder updates while providing structured processes that ensure consistency. Target users include engineering teams at organizations with high availability requirements, multi-team organizations requiring sophisticated routing and escalation, and reliability-focused organizations viewing incidents as learning opportunities for continuous improvement.

Background

Rootly emerged from the founders' experience at Instacart, where they identified critical gaps in incident management tooling for technology teams operating at scale. The company has grown to approximately 35 employees based in San Francisco, demonstrating strong commercial success with recognition in Deloitte's Technology Fast 50 program. The platform maintains active development with continuous API updates, feature additions, and bug fixes documented through systematic version management. Rootly operates primarily as a commercial SaaS platform while maintaining selective open-source components including a Terraform provider under MPL-2.0 license and a Backstage plugin under Apache 2.0 license. The company launched Rootly AI Labs as an open-source incubator focused on advancing reliability engineering research and community innovation.

Main features

Slack-native incident coordination and automation

Rootly's Slack integration automatically creates dedicated incident channels with configured naming conventions, adds relevant team members, creates conference bridges, and posts structured incident information accessible to all responders. The platform provides slash commands enabling responders to perform incident management actions without leaving Slack, including /rootly page for escalating to on-call personnel, /rootly assign for role assignment, and /rootly task for creating action items. This approach eliminates context switching during high-stress incidents while maintaining comprehensive incident timelines that capture every action, decision, and investigation note in chronological order, serving as the authoritative record for retrospectives and root cause analysis.

Workflow automation engine with conditional logic

The workflow automation engine removes repetitive manual work through trigger-driven sequences consisting of trigger events, run conditions, and actions across integrated systems. Common patterns include automatically creating Jira tickets when specific services are impacted, posting periodic stakeholder reminders, notifying security teams for high-severity incidents, and updating status pages based on incident status changes. Workflows support sophisticated conditional logic enabling patterns like "when an incident is created with severity SEV0 and impacts the payment service, automatically page the payment team and notify the CTO." Wait conditions between actions enable escalation paths such as "immediately send notification, wait 15 minutes, if unacknowledged, escalate to manager" without manual intervention.

Comprehensive on-call management and escalation

Rootly On-Call provides complete on-call management through schedules defining rotation patterns and escalation policies determining when and how to page responders. Organizations can configure rotation types including daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, or custom patterns, specify active days and hours supporting geographically distributed teams, and nest schedules hierarchically for complex organizational structures. Escalation policies link to services affected, automatically paging the on-call person for that service's escalation policy when incidents occur. Multi-layer escalation chains trigger sequentially if responders don't acknowledge initial notifications, preventing critical incidents from being missed while avoiding alert fatigue from aggressive paging. The mobile app supports iOS and Android for on-call acknowledgment and escalation.