The service catalog that makes every incident smarter.

Rootly Catalog is a automated, catalog-driven service directory built directly into Rootly's incident management platform. It stores and organizes your organization's services, teams, components, runbooks, and dependencies—and connects that context to every incident the moment it's declared. When an alert fires, Rootly knows what's affected, who owns it, what runbooks apply, and which teams need to be in the room—without anyone having to look it up.

Learn more: Automated service catalogs for incident management and how Rootly fits a modern incident response stack.

A CMDB is a configuration database typically managed by IT and updated manually. Rootly Catalog is a living model of your engineering organization—synced continuously from your existing tools, used actively during incidents, and designed for the engineers who respond to them. It's not a record-keeping system. It's the operational context layer that makes every incident smarter.

Every incident declared in Rootly automatically inherits context from the Catalog—affected services, owning teams, related runbooks, upstream and downstream dependencies, and on-call schedules. Responders arrive with context already assembled. Workflows fire based on service ownership. The right people are paged automatically. Catalog is the connective tissue between your org structure and your incident response—not a standalone tool you have to remember to check.

Both products connect organizational context to incidents. The difference is flexibility and integration depth. incident.io describes their Catalog as a "rules engine that understands your organization"—it's a powerful concept, but one that requires you to build and maintain your org model inside their platform on their terms. Rootly Catalog is designed to reflect how your organization already works, syncing from your existing tools, supporting custom types and custom terminology, and integrating with Rootly's full platform including On-Call, AI SRE, and workflow automation, without locking you into a rigid data model you can't adjust as your org evolves.

Yes. Rootly Catalog integrates with tools like Cortex, Backstage, and other service catalog providers, so if you already have a source of truth, Rootly pulls from it rather than asking you to rebuild. New services added to your catalog are automatically reflected in Rootly, keeping ownership, metadata, and routing rules current without manual maintenance.

Rootly uses, but does not depend on, Catalog data to route alerts to the right team automatically—mapping alerts to services, services to owners, and owners to on-call schedules. When an alert fires, Rootly knows which service is affected, who owns it, and who's on-call for it. No manual triage. No paging the wrong team. No relying on institutional knowledge to figure out who owns what at 3am.

Yes. Rootly Catalog is built for the org's getting started and the org's that come with enterprise engineering needs—multiple business units, deeply nested service hierarchies, cross-functional ownership, and teams that change frequently. Custom catalog types let you model your org in your own terminology—teams, squads, domains—without being forced into a structure that doesn't fit. Deep RBAC controls ensure the right people see the right catalog entries, and changes propagate automatically across workflows, routing rules, and incident metadata.

The moment an incident is declared in Rootly, the Catalog populates the incident record with relevant context—affected services, owning teams, dependencies, runbooks, and customer impact. This context is visible to all responders in Slack without leaving the incident channel, auto-populates custom fields, drives workflow automation, and feeds into the retrospective and post-incident reporting. Catalog data doesn't just inform the incident—it helps power the entire response motion from declaration to close.

Three reasons. First, flexibility and ease of use—Rootly Catalog adapts to your org structure and terminology rather than requiring you to adopt incident.io's rigid structure. Second, integration with the full incident lifecycle—Catalog context flows directly into On-Call routing, AI SRE investigation, workflow automation, and retrospective generation in a single platform. Third, enterprise depth—RBAC, just-in-time access controls, and isolated tenant support mean Catalog works for security-sensitive and compliance-heavy organizations that need more than a shared service model.