# Rootly vs. Datadog URL: https://rootly.com/alternatives/rootly-vs-datadog > Keep Datadog for monitoring. Why Datadog teams run on-call, incident response, and AI investigation on Rootly, independent of the tools it watches. Keep Datadog for monitoring. Run incidents on a platform built only for them, independent of the tools it watches. [Get started for free](https://rootly.com/users/sign_up) · [Book a demo](https://rootly.com/demo) Last verified October 22, 2026 · [All comparisons](https://rootly.com/alternatives) Brex · SoFi · DoorDash · Trivago · Tripadvisor · Affirm · SailPoint · NVIDIA · Figma · Mistral AI · Replit · Glean · Elastic Poshmark · Stack Overflow · Dropbox · Canva · Grammarly · The Weather Channel · Okta · Cisco · MIT · Zillow · Zscaler · Wise --- ## Why Datadog teams run incidents on Rootly. Datadog is built to see. Everything after the alert needs a purpose-built platform to respond, resolve, and prevent. 1. 01 **Independent of your monitoring.** Your incident platform shouldn’t share a failure domain with the systems it watches. 2. 02 **Built to keep your software reliable.** On-call, response, AI SRE, status pages, and retrospectives, designed to run together. 3. 03 **AI across the entire incident lifecycle.** Datadog is one source among many, because your incidents don’t stay inside one vendor. 4. 04 **Every audience in the loop.** Responders, leadership, and customers kept current without pulling anyone off the fix. 01 ## Independent of the tools it watches. When monitoring is degraded is exactly when you need to page, coordinate, and tell customers. So Rootly runs on its own infrastructure, separate from every tool that sends it alerts. 99.99% uptime SLA A contractual commitment on paging, not a target. Multi-region by design Redundant regions, so one region’s trouble isn’t your pager’s. Multi-channel fallbacks Push, SMS, and voice, so a critical page lands even if one channel is degraded. Heartbeats catch silence If a pipeline stops checking in, its owners are paged. Quiet isn’t mistaken for healthy. 02 ## Built to keep your software reliable, not an afterthought product among many. Datadog’s incident tools extend an observability platform. Rootly is built for everything after the alert. 1. 1. Page Rootly Alerts from Datadog and every other source route by service, team, escalation policy, and more. Datadog Routes Datadog monitors by tag and priority. Other tools arrive by email, API, or events. 2. 2. Respond Rootly Declaring opens a Slack or Teams channel with roles, severity, and responders set. Datadog Incidents live in the Datadog app, with chat integrations reaching into them. 3. 3. Investigate Rootly AI SRE investigates from the first alert across Datadog and the rest of your stack. Datadog Bits Investigation reads Datadog telemetry. Third-party sources are in Preview. 4. 4. Communicate Rootly Workflows and the Rootly agent keep status pages and stakeholders current. Datadog Status page notices are published by hand from the incident. 5. 5. Learn Rootly Retrospectives draft from all the context, and action items are tracked to done. Datadog Postmortems generate into Notebooks, Confluence, or Google Drive. Follow-ups are open or done. ## On-call your engineers won’t dread. Easy-to-use experiences that decide whether a rotation is fair, covered, and paid properly, with agents along the way to help. - **Native shadow rotations** No extra rota, no manual cleanup when shadowing ends. - **Request coverage** Overrides and requesting coverage made easy, including your PTO and holiday schedule. - **Automated gap detection** Never get caught with no one on call. - **On-call pay calculator** No more manually calculating who should get paid with spreadsheets. - **Synced Slack user groups** Sync Slack user groups like @team-infra with on-call schedules. - **Mobile app with AI** Ask questions and direct actions right from your fingertips, from anywhere in the world. --- 03 ## AI that investigates across your whole stack. AI SRE treats Datadog as one source among many. Datadog’s own AI reaches third-party tools only in Preview. - Datadog - Grafana - New Relic - Sentry - Splunk - Dynatrace - GitHub - Linear **Investigate** Starts the moment an alert fires, pulling in alerts, deploys, telemetry, and past incidents from every connected tool. **Find root cause** Probable root causes ranked with confidence scores, and the evidence behind each one. **Suggest the fix** Suggested fixes and next steps, with full visibility into how and why each was reached. > We cut our resolution times in half and reduced repeat incidents. Rootly has been our best investment in terms of ROI. Geoff Powell, Sr. Technical Manager, SRE ## And AI through the rest of the incident. From the first message in the channel to the retrospective, with every feature yours to switch on. - **An assistant in every channel** Tag @Rootly for a catch-up, a draft update, or a severity change, without leaving the incident. - **A scribe on every call** Rootly AI joins the bridge, transcribes in real time, and captures decisions as they’re made. - **Retrospectives drafted for you** Generated from the full incident context, with the timeline already written. --- 04 ## Every audience in the loop, without pulling anyone off the fix. - Responders Run the incident end to end in Slack or Teams: roles, severity, paging, and workflows, without another console. - Leadership AI-drafted updates at the right level of detail, plus reporting on MTTR, repeat incidents, and on-call load. - Customers Status pages ship with Incident Response, and @Rootly drafts and publishes notices to subscribers. --- ## How does Datadog compare to Rootly? | Cost, then capability | Datadog | Rootly | | --- | --- | --- | | Incident AI in the user price Summaries, scribe, and retrospectives without a usage meter. | Metered AI credits | AI SRE priced separately | | Incident workflow automation included Workflows triggered by incidents and on-call run without execution charges. | Other workflows metered per execution | Supported | | Status pages included Public and internal status pages. | Full use needs a committed seat | With Incident Response | | AI investigation of third-party tools Grafana, Sentry, Splunk, Dynatrace, and more. | Preview | Supported | | AI investigation from any alert source Start an investigation from any tool’s alert. | Documented for Datadog monitors | Supported | | AI investigation of Datadog telemetry Logs, metrics, APM, monitors, and RUM. | Supported | Supported | | AI retrospectives Auto-generate retrospectives from the incident. | Needs 10+ timeline messages | Supported | | Alert sources beyond Datadog Grafana, Prometheus Alertmanager, New Relic, Sentry, etc. | Via email, API, or events | Native alert sources | | On-call scheduling Create and manage rotation schedules. | Supported | Supported | | Live call routing Turn a phone call into a page. | Supported | Supported | | Slack-native incident management Run incidents end-to-end without leaving Slack. | Supported | Supported | | MS Teams incident management Incident channels, paging, and meetings in Teams. | Supported | Supported | | Status pages updated by workflows Keep notices current without leaving the response. | Published manually | Supported | | AI meeting summaries Capture the incident call automatically. | Supported | Supported | | Service catalog Teams, services, and ownership modelled once. | Supported | Supported | | MCP server Connect your IDE, CLI, and AI agents. | Supported | Supported | | Private incidents Restrict who can see sensitive incidents. | Supported | Supported | | SSO / SAML Single sign-on via SAML. | Supported | Supported | | Audit logging Track changes and actions across the platform. | Supported | Supported | Show all features Close --- ## Datadog for detection. Rootly for everything after. One kept Datadog for monitoring, one weighed its incident tools. Both chose Rootly. - Kept Datadog for monitoring. Moved paging and response to Rootly. > “Rootly was fast to roll out—within an hour we had schedules, escalations, and Slack-based alerting working, with primary and secondary on-call cleanly separated.” **Travis Haas** Senior Engineering Manager and Principal SRE 50% faster first response to off-hours alerts 60% fewer unnecessary wake-ups [Read the Poll Everywhere story](https://rootly.com/customers/poll-everywhere) - Weighed Datadog’s incident features against dedicated platforms. Chose Rootly. > “We weren’t just looking for feature coverage. We wanted a platform and partner that could grow with us as our process became more mature.” **Chris Inch** Director of Engineering 60–70 trained incident commanders across the company Shorter on-call rotations, with command shared more widely [Read the Wealthsimple story](https://rootly.com/customers/wealthsimple) ## Thousands of engineering leaders choose Rootly. ## Keep Datadog for the signal. Let Rootly run the incident. [Get started for free](https://rootly.com/users/sign_up) · [Book a demo](https://rootly.com/demo) ## Frequently asked questions Everything you need to know about Rootly vs. Datadog. ### Is Rootly a replacement for Datadog? Not for observability. Datadog collects and visualizes your metrics, logs, and traces, and Rootly doesn’t. Rootly replaces what happens after the alert fires: on-call, incident response, AI investigation, status pages, and retrospectives. Most Rootly customers on Datadog keep it as their observability platform and send its monitors to Rootly. ### What is the difference between Datadog Incident Management and Rootly? Both can declare incidents, assign roles, run them in Slack, and generate retrospectives. The difference is where the work lives and what it can see. Datadog Incident Management is part of the Datadog platform and works best when your alerts and telemetry are in Datadog. Rootly is a dedicated incident platform that runs the response in Slack or Microsoft Teams, takes alerts from any monitoring tool, and investigates across all of them, Datadog included. ### How does Rootly integrate with Datadog? Datadog monitors send alerts to Rootly through a webhook, where they page on-call, open incidents, or trigger workflows. Workflows can create a Datadog notebook, capture a graph snapshot, or attach a dashboard to the incident timeline. Rootly AI SRE connects to Datadog’s hosted MCP server with read-only access, so investigations can query your Datadog logs, metrics, APM traces, monitors, RUM, and database monitoring. ### How does Rootly AI SRE compare to Bits Investigation (formerly Bits AI SRE)? Bits Investigation is strong inside Datadog: it starts from Datadog monitors and reasons over Datadog telemetry. Its third-party data sources, such as Grafana, Sentry, and Splunk, are in Preview. Rootly AI SRE treats Datadog as one source among many, alongside tools like Grafana, New Relic, Sentry, Splunk, Dynatrace, GitHub, and Confluence, and it can start from any alert Rootly receives. Every finding comes with its evidence and a confidence level, and the model can’t declare a root cause on its own. ### When is Datadog’s incident tooling enough? If your team is small, every alert comes from a Datadog monitor, and responders are happy to work inside the Datadog app, Datadog On-Call and Incident Management cover the basics with the fewest moving parts. Teams usually add Rootly when alerts come from more than one tool, when the response needs to run in Slack or Teams for the whole company, or when retrospectives and follow-ups need to be tracked through to completion. ### Why keep incident management separate from monitoring? Because the two fail together when they share a platform. The tool that pages your team, coordinates the response, and updates your customers is most needed when something in your stack is degraded, so it should run independently of what it watches. Rootly runs on its own multi-region infrastructure with a 99.99% uptime SLA and takes alerts from every monitoring tool you use, so the response doesn’t depend on any one of them. ### Can we run Rootly alongside Datadog On-Call? Yes. Point the Datadog monitors for a pilot team at Rootly’s webhook while the rest keep paging through Datadog On-Call, then move teams over in batches once they trust the page. Rootly supports dual-running during the transition, and most teams are live within a week. ### How does Datadog price its incident products? As listed on Datadog’s pricing page in October 2026, billed annually: On-Call is $20 per seat per month, Incident Management is $30, and the two together are $40. Bits Investigation, Bits Chat, and Bits Code draw on AI credits, sold at $500 per 500-credit bundle per month, and unused committed credits don’t roll over. Workflow Automation is metered per execution, except workflows triggered by Incident Management or On-Call, which are included. ### How much does Rootly cost? Incident Response is $20 and On-Call is $20 per user per month, or $40 for both at list price. AI SRE requires Incident Response and is priced on request, Enterprise pricing is custom, and the free trial typically lasts two weeks. [See Rootly pricing](https://rootly.com/pricing). ### Does Rootly work in Slack and Microsoft Teams? Yes. Rootly runs the incident natively in Slack and Microsoft Teams: declaring incidents, creating channels, paging on-call, running workflows, starting meetings, and updating stakeholders, without switching to a separate interface. ### How long does it take to get started? Connecting Datadog takes minutes: point your monitors at Rootly’s webhook and add the AI connector. Most teams are live on Rootly within a week, with a dedicated support channel throughout.