Rootly

I use Rootly every day to manage the end-to-end incident lifecycle. When a critical incident is reported, I create or join an incident on Rootly, assign the appropriate severity, and engage the required engineer to support the team through Slack. I use the platform to track incident updates, maintain an accurate timeline, assign responders, and send timely internal and stakeholder communications. Once the issue is resolved, we mitigate or resolve the incident.

I use Rootly to schedule and document the postmortem, capture the root cause analysis, and action items if there are any.

As a critical incident manager, I use Rootly to create incidents and assign the appropriate severity level. There was a recent issue with the Salesforce access application where multiple employees were unable to log in to the platform and perform their daily work. I used Rootly to create an incident and assign the appropriate severity automatically. The dedicated Slack incident channel was created automatically, which is beneficial as Rootly integrates with Slack.

After creating the incident, I engaged the respective on-calls while tracking the investigation by maintaining a live incident timeline with updates from all the engineering teams, coordinating communication between technical teams and stakeholders, and sending timely internal and end-user communications at key milestones, including the incident acknowledgment, mitigation, and resolution or restoration times. I recorded key timestamps such as impact start, detected, mitigation, and resolution in Rootly.

After Rootly incident was marked resolved, I scheduled a postmortem with the documentation already built into Rootly. The documentation is built in with all the details, which I filled such as root cause, mitigation, long-term fix, or permanent fix in Rootly postmortem template. Following the completion of the postmortem meeting, I went back to Rootly ticket to create action items, assign them to the owner, and assign due dates to ensure completion. Using Rootly helped keep all responders aligned in one place, reduce manual coordination, maintain a complete audit trail of the incident, and ensure the post-incident review and action items were completed efficiently.

Rootly's best features include the Slack integration, which makes it easy to create, manage, and coordinate incidents without switching between multiple tools. Automatic incident timelines, stakeholder notifications, and status updates reduce manual efforts and help maintain consistency during incidents. Postmortem template and action item tracking simplify root cause analysis documentation and ensure follow-up tasks are captured efficiently.

Integration tools including Jira and ServiceNow help streamline the incident lifecycle. Rootly dashboard provides good visibility into active incidents, ownership, and incident metrics.

Rootly has positively impacted my organization by saving time with manually adding timelines, as they are already built in when timelines are added in Slack through integration. I can simply pin it, which is most secure and saves time. It also improves the resolution rate by tracking all data and timelines efficiently. Around twenty-five percent of the resolution rate has improved in the last six months. Rootly has saved my team time per incident with a twenty-five percent improvement in the resolution rate.

There are a few areas where Rootly can be improved. More customization options for postmortem templates and reports would be helpful. Enhancing search functionality to make it easier to locate historical incidents and action items would be beneficial. Better reporting and analytics for recurring incidents and SLA trends would improve problem management. Additionally, flexibility in notification settings and workflow customization would benefit organizations with different incident processes.

I have been working in my current field for almost five years.

I advise others looking into using Rootly to invest time in configuring your incident workflow, integration, and postmortem templates upfront. This will help your team to get more value from Rootly by reducing manual efforts and improving coordination during incidents.

Rootly has been a valuable tool for managing critical incidents and problems management as well as postmortems. Its automation, Slack integration, and collaboration features have helped me streamline the incident response process. Continued enhancements to reporting, search capabilities, and AI-powered insights would make the platform even more effective. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.