🎓 Customizable Interactive Tutorials

One of our largest investment areas is how we can help organizations drive better adoption of their incident management process.

We are excited to launch our Interactive Tutorials that are customizable and designed to effectively teach users about Rootly and your incident response process.

Why? It is unsustainable for individuals on an SRE team to teach everyone themselves. Current ways of learning via presentations, docs, and meetings are unmatched for hands on learning. Reduce on-call anxiety and improve muscle memory!

Launch your interactive tutorial via /incident test in Slack.

• Default tutorial OOTB has turn-by-turn guidance and beautiful graphics for using Rootly
• Easy to understand prompts that are interactive for completing a task
• Customizable messaging and steps to suit your organization inside of workflows
• Test incidents don't impact production metrics

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 Rootly is again awarded G2 Fall 2022 badges for High Performer, Easiest to Do Business With, and Users Love Us for Incident Management
• 🆕 Workflow task for adding a comment to Jira
• 💅 Team members view defaults to 100
• 💅 Continued infrastructure improvements specifically around our database
• 💅 Icons for integrations inside of Slack got a fresh coat of paint
• 🐛 Fixed issue around scheduled maintenance not notifying status page subscribers
• 🐛 Fixed issue where deleting a workflow would redirect you incorrectly afterwards
• 🐛 Fixed issue where incidents that were canceled still prompted users a banner that the incident was unresolved for 24hrs

🐛 Workflow Debugger

We are excited to launch our Debug Workflows capability for all customers!

If you've ever wondered why a workflow did not run and spent time debugging it, this is for you.

This compares incident conditions against expected values against actual values and provides a pass or fail result depending on what was satisfied.

• Debug in seconds instead of manually cross checking if conditions were met
• Drill down into specific workflows on a per incident basis
• Used for incidents, postmortems, action items, pulse, and alert workflows
• Support for custom field conditions

Our Workflow Debugger complements our other suite of engineering productivity tools such as Incident Variable Explorer.

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 Multi-select option on filters in Web Platform
• 🆕 Due date field for action items
• 🆕 Workflow task for adding comments to Linear tickets
• 🆕 Workflow task for updating Opsgenie alerts (acknowledge + close)
• 🆕 Incident variables for scheduled maintenance {{incident.scheduled_for}} and {{incident.scheduled_until}}
• 💅 Better and human readable date filters for Rootly API
• 💅 Cleaned up free trial demo data for action items
• 💅 Less noisy default Form Fields on free trials
• 💅 Better error messaging when free trial has ended
• 💅 Removed deleted workflows from showing up in Debug Workflows
• 💅 Removed confusing drop down menus from incident creation on Web Platform
• 💅 Default 90 day filter for metrics
• 💅 Updated customer logos on Rootly
• 🐛 Fixed issue where canceling the creation of a workflow via template gave a 404 error
• 🐛 Fixed issue where some redirect links for integrations gave a 500 error
• 🐛 Fixed issue where services and teams updated trigger were not firing properly

🌾 Required, Default, and Customizable Fields

We are introducing Form Fields that will allow you to customize what you capture whenever an incident is created, updated, mitigated, and resolved.

Why? Incident response is unique across every organization and the data captured will vary dramatically. Where one organization may care about the incident type when the incident is resolved others may not. Customization is crucial to fit each organizations data models.

• Ability to mark fields as required for data compliance
• Ability to pre-populate default fields (e.g. severity is always triage until updated otherwise)
• Support across both Slack and Web Platform with independent control
• Reorder fields that reflect the how they show up in /incident new and in Web Platform

With the introduction of Form Fields, we've deprecated the need to separately manage Slack and Web Platform from separate locations and merged it in a single pane of glass.

This is now GA for all customers, try it here.

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 Ability to select PagerDuty or Opsgenie priority when paging
• 🆕 Workflow task for creating an Opsgenie alert
• 🆕 Custom fields support the ability to select default fields to pre-populate details
• 🆕 Ability to link Rootly services with Backstage via API
• 💅 Incident variable for {{ incident.jira_issue_key }} & {{ incident.linear_issue_key }}
• 💅 Infrastructure and CI improvements that allow our test suite to run 90% faster
• 🐛 Fixed issue where for few customers workflows ran despite wrong conditions
• 🐛 Fixed issue where using the incident variable quick selector pasted multiple values instead of one
• 🐛 Fixed issue where profile photos on incident timeline were incorrect

⚡ Zapier Integration

Rootly boasts the most extensible incident management platform with the most comprehensive 3rd party integration library, Open API, and capability to make external API via workflows.

Today, we are excited to announce our integration with Zapier (5000+ no-code integrations), taking our pluggable ecosystem one step further. A few things you can do.

• Create incidents from emails that have incident in the subject line
• Update customer in Salesforce when a new incident is created
• Intercom conversations tagged with #incident send alerts to Rootly
• Alerts from Pingdom automatically create incidents in Rootly

Zapier supports triggers for Incidents, Alerts, and Pulses (e.g. deploy changes).

Getting started documentation: https://docs.rootly.com/integrations/zapier.

Learn more: https://rootly.com/integrations/zapier

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 Awarded Users Love Us badge by G2 for consistently high customer satisfaction
• 🆕 Ability to configure separate emojis for follow-up action items 📝 (do later) and task action items ⭐ (do now)
• 🆕 Official plugin support for Roadie, a managed Spotify Backstage platform
• 🆕 Template support for Rootly status pages (not Statuspage.io)
• 🆕 Ability to reorder columns by clicking on headings for Incident and Postmortem in table view
• 🆕 LinkedIn product page for Rootly
• 💅 Infrastructure improvements for workflow execution and accuracy
• 💅 Deprecated birds eye view from incidents and postmortem on Web Platform
• 💅 /incident support allows for questions as a request type, previously only allowed bug reports or feature requests
• 💅 Verbiage changes around consistently calling licensed Rootly users organizational members in the Web Platform
• 💅 Verbiage changes around how Private Incidents to better align with RBAC capabilities
• 💅 Better mobile web support for https://rootly.com/
• 🐛 Fixed issue where topic updates in incident channel were double and triple posting
• 🐛 Fixed issue where user profile photos in the incident timeline were inaccurate
• 🐛 Fixed issue where schedule maintenance was not triggering correctly

🔧 Scheduled Maintenance

Rootly serves as a single pane of glass for incidents and now scheduled maintenance events.

A scheduled maintenance is a period of planned downtime communicated in advance. Like incidents, they share many of the same fields such as title, summary, service impact, and more.

Customers can create a scheduled maintenance event directly from Slack or Web Platform.

Maintenance specific workflows around communication, escalation, and more can be built separate from typical incident workflows.

• Schedule start and end time for scheduled maintenance
• Upgrade a scheduled maintenance to a full incident if necessary (e.g. create incident channel)
• Ability to update status page of scheduled maintenance
• Select impacted services, functionalities, teams, and more
• Maintenances displayed in Rootly are visually different from incidents and by default created silently

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 Incident variable for {{ incident.action_items }}
• 🆕 Shortcut button for adding action items after an incident is resolved in Slack
• 🆕 Terraform support for custom fields in workflow triggers
• 💅 Attaching Rootly services and functionalities hidden when configuring Atlassian Statuspage
• 🐛 Fixed issue where postmortems still persisted on Rootly dashboard after incident was deleted
• 🐛 Fixed issue where elapsed time on Web Platform was not dynamically refreshing

📥 Branded Emails and Custom SMTP Server

As much as we love sending emails branded with Rootly (e.g. no-reply@rootly.com), we think making it your own helps communication be even clearer.

We are excited to launch the ability to integrate with your own SMTP server (e.g. alias@company.com) and have all emails come from your own domain.

We understand when communicating externally that having the brand Rootly might confuse your stakeholders. You can brand your emails with your own custom logo.

• Customize subject line and preheader text with support for incident variables
• Specify CC and BCC addresses
• Option to send as many individualized and branded emails depending on use case (e.g. internal leadership, customer, etc)
• Support for workflow tasks, triggered based on conditions automatically or manual
• Customize body of email with incident variables

Existing customer can first setup their SMTP server inside integrations then configure in Workflows > Tasks > Send Email.

Note, this is optional. By default Rootly will send all emails on your behalf if nothing is configured.

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 Custom field for Textarea that offers adjustable text area, previously limited to single line for free form text
• 🆕 API for listing workflow runs
• 🆕 Added data sources for both Terraform and Pulumi provider
• 🆕 Our Rootly status page has migrated to a new Atlassian Statuspage
• 💅 Update Incident workflow task includes the ability to update incident severity
• 💅 Default metric filters for last 100 days and YTD out of the box
• 💅 Clearer guidance for setting up Atlassian Statuspage integration
• 💅 Polished UI for workflow tasks list for easier navigation
• 🐛 Fixed issue where custom metrics dashboard URL was not redirecting correctly when shared
• 🐛 Fixed issue where integrating with Confluence and searching for a space key did not work

⛵ Incident Variable Explorer

Since our launch of incident variables (see changelog), they have quickly become an integral part of Rootly.

Customers leverage it today to build workflows, better automate communication, deep customization (e.g. rename incident title to Jira ticket number), and more. However, with 100s of options, knowing which ones to use and if they work can be confusing.

We are excited to launch our Incident Variable Explorer that makes as the name suggests browsing, exploring, and testing incident variables even easier.

• Browse incident variable output on a per incident basis
• Interactive incident variable preview to test and see example outputs based on incident selected
• View all available incident variable options with context instead of scrolling through generic docs
• Preview incident variable data for not only incidents but postmortems, action items, alerts, and pulses
• View incident variable data for all integrations (e.g. {{ incident.jira_issue_url }})

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 API endpoint for executing specific workflows
• 🆕 Partial matching support for sources, labels, and payloads inside of workflows alerts and pulses
• 🆕 Ability to define a name attribute in API key for easier identification
• 🆕 Ability to sync Rootly incident title and events with PagerDuty incident title and status updates
• 💅 Alert when /incident workflow example-command is ran outside of the automatically created incident channel
• 💅 Additional education resources now live on Backstage Community repo
• 💅 Ability to update custom fields in Update Incident workflow task
• 💅 Freshly updated docs around our Statuspage.io integration
• 💅 Additional incident variables for Google Meet
• 🐛 Fixed issue where incident cause was not being attached to postmortems for some users
• 🐛 Fixed issue where renaming workflow groups for alerts reset the incident kind
• 🐛 Fixed issue where editing the incident channel Slack URL did not save
• 🐛 Fixed issue where where filtering with JSON for events caused some webhook events to improperly filter

📡 Statuspage.io Integration - Component & Template Support

We are excited to launch our Atlassian Statuspage.io integration with support for components and templates.

Customers will be able to manage all communication updates to Statuspage without needing to leave Slack or fumble around with logins and access.

Fast and transparent communication is crucial for successfully managing incidents. Update Statuspage using /incident statuspage or inside of the Rootly Web Platform.

• Import Statuspage templates and apply them to any Rootly incident for consistent messaging and speed
• Publish to multiple Statuspages (e.g. customer facing and internal facing)
• Separately control what is displayed externally on Statuspage vs. the status of your Rootly incident
• Individually select impact of Statuspage components (e.g. degraded performance, major outage, etc.)
• Published updates are automatically shared in the incident Slack channel and incident timeline for visibility

Customers may choose to programatically update their Statuspage by leveraging workflows (e.g. if greater than SEV1 then publish Investigating update to Statuspage).

Getting started: https://docs.rootly.com/integrations/status-page-io

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 Ability to convert public incidents to private
• 🆕 Create incidents option from Alerts view in Web Platfrom now allow modifying incident details before creation
• 💅 Severity descriptions are shown when running /incident update
• 💅 All workflows by default have Slack Command trigger to reduce confusion for manually ran workflows
• 🐛 Fixed issue where /incident feedback was not working for some users
• 🐛 Fixed issue where assigning roles in /incident test was not working

🏖️ Sandbox Environments

We are making testing your configurations, workflows, and integrations safer and easier with sandbox environments!

A standalone instance of Rootly connected to a separate non-production Slack environment.

An important consideration was ensuring you can seamlessly switch back and forth between production and sandbox environments that does not require logging in and out. You can do this with our organization switcher (top right drop down).

To get started, let your Partnerships Manager know and we'll provision one for you!

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 Action items are shown on Notion generated postmortems
• 🆕 Scheduled start and end times added to incident timeline page
• 🆕 Attribute for private incident visibility in Rootly API
• 💅 Ability to click move to reorganize workflows instead of drag and drop
• 💅 Action items are linked on postmortem tab for easier reference
• 🐛 Fixed issue where workflow for Jira subtasks were not being triggered
• 🐛 Fixed issue where disabling the automatic creation of incident channels was not respected
• 🐛 Fixed issue where roles were not showing up for /incident test
• 🐛 Fixed issue where some users were getting invalid triggers error on duplicate workflows

🍫 Rollbar Integration

We are excited to announce our Rollbar integration, one of the world's most popular error tracking and notification software.

For many of our customers, Rollbar is often detects errors related to incidents before anything else.

Now with the Rollbar and Rootly integration, customers can respond and gain context into incidents even faster, all-in-one place.

• Ingest alerts created by Rollbar into Rootly (Web or Slack) with all relevant metadata
• Triage Rollbar alerts in Rootly and create an incident with human in the loop
• Automatically create incidents in Rootly is Rollbar alerts exceed a defined threshold

Getting started guide: https://docs.rootly.com/integrations/rollbar

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 Users can manage notifications in Rootly for email and Slack (User > Account Details > Notifications)
• 🆕 Workflow condition for contains alongside already existing ones such as is one of and is set
• 🆕 Workflow task for getting alerts
• 💅 Rootly internal status page is now rebranded to Incident Timeline Page across all platforms
• 💅 Colours in metrics automatically randomize colours if two are the same
• 💅 Shiny new customer logos on https://rootly.com/, welcome aboard 👋
• 🐛 Fixed issue where help links in /incident help were broken