You can now use a new Workflow action to automatically create sub-incidents and keep them intelligently synced with a parent incident. This enables you to run a centralized incident response while coordinating with external teams, regions, or stakeholders in parallel—without leaking sensitive context, overwhelming responders, or fragmenting incident data.
Why it matters
Large incidents often require multiple work streams: engineering response, customer communications, security reviews, or regional coordination. This new workflow action lets you treat the parent incident as the source of truth, while using sub-incidents as focused coordination spaces—automatically kept in sync.
When the Create Sub-Incident action runs:
- Centralized truth, distributed execution: All key resources—services, environments, functionalities, and groups—are copied from the parent into the sub-incident. This ensures every team starts with the same context, while allowing them to operate independently.
- Automatic status alignment: Summary, severity, and status stay continuously synced between parent and sub-incidents. As the incident evolves, leadership and responders remain aligned without manual updates or duplicated effort.
- Intentional stakeholder separation: Users added to the parent incident Slack channel are automatically added to sub-incident channels, enabling core responders to observe all workstreams. Additions in sub-incidents do not propagate upward, preventing accidental access and maintaining clean boundaries between groups.
- Aggregated visibility for leadership: Timeline events from sub-incidents are automatically rolled up into the parent incident’s timeline, giving incident commanders and executives a complete view without needing to monitor multiple channels.
- Synchronized Slack communication: When sync events occur, updates are posted to both parent and sub-incident Slack channels, keeping everyone informed without duplicating messages or creating noise.
How it works
- In an Incident Workflow, add the Create Sub-Incident action.
- Define the sub-incident title and summary, with full access to Liquid for dynamic values.
- Trigger the workflow on incident creation or another lifecycle event.
- Rootly automatically creates the sub-incident and maintains synchronization throughout the incident lifecycle.
Check out the docs to learn more.
What else shipped
Automatic Team Admin assignment for team creators
When you create a team, you’ll now be automatically assigned as that team’s admin. This is especially valuable for enterprise organizations with locked-down permissions, enabling teams to own and manage their configurations without relying on global admins.
Check out the docs here.