💨 Making Incident Creation a Breeze

Whenever customers adopt Rootly, our name quickly becomes synonymous with the easiest way to create incidents.

Today, we are making incident creation even easier by introducing a new slash command /incident on Slack.

• /incident will function exactly the same as /rootly
• Both slash commands can be used at the same time and interchangeably

Why did we do this? Although /rootly was great, many organizations that had a homegrown bot had already defaulted to using /incident.

Not only is it more intuitive, it also means less behavioural changes for our customers which is critical to adoption!

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 Workflows for PagerDuty now support paging escalation policies in addition to schedules and individuals
• 🆕 Customers who use VictorOps can now create Workflows to page
• 🆕 Ability to pin more file formats to incident timeline
• 🆕 Add events to incident timeline in Slack with /rootly timeline or /incident timeline command
• 💅 Improved Web UI for action items so at a glance much easier to see what is open
• 💅 Assigning users for action items are now ordered alphabetically
• 💅 Integrations when configured prompt users to navigate to Workflows to complete their setup
• 💅 Adding items to incident timeline from Web users can use Ctrl + Enter as a keyboard shortcut
• 💅 Invested into additional monitoring for the Web platform and integrations
• 💅 Relaxed rate limit requirements for bulk updates and configuration
• 🐛 Fixed issue where PagerDuty did not page the Admin who originally configured it in Rootly
• 🐛 Fixed issue where incident timeline occasionally displayed the incorrect date, one day in advance. Yes timezone is hard
• 🐛 Fixed issue where occasionally Workflows did not trigger on incident update but did on incident creation

🔮 Workflows 2.0 - Next Gen Incident Automation

We are excited to introduce the next generation of our Workflows feature to help automate the entire incident process in a consistent way!

What has changed since Workflows 1.0? Well, now all integrations are supported by our simple but powerful automation engine!

• Zoom / Google Meet
• Confluence / Google Docs
• PagerDuty / Opsgenie
• Jira / Zendesk / Linear / Asana / Trello / Shortcut / ServiceNow / Airtable

Use cases with Workflows 2.0 that you couldn't before? A few examples:

1. 🔮 Create Jira tickets on multiple project board depending on which team is impacted
2. 🔮 Open a Zoom or Google Meet bridge for high severity (>SEV1) incidents for high bandwidth conversations
3. 🔮 Automatically page the Infrastructure team via PagerDuty or Opsgenie whenever the postgres-db is impacted
4. 🔮 Use different Confluence or Google Doc postmortem templates if the incident was security related
5. 🔮 ...thousands of other combinations to fit your exact incident process!

We make getting started simple too. When you first configure an integration we'll automatically create the Workflow template for you in 1-click. You can go in and modify anything you want later.

We are excited to see what you come up with and build!

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 Buyers guide for whether or not you should build or buy an incident management platform: https://rootly.com/buy-vs-build
• 🆕 Add new item to incident timeline via /rootly timeline instead of only using an emoji 📌 to pin items
• 🆕 More detail provided in Opsgenie alerts when paged via Rootly to give responders better context
• 🆕 Significant loading and performance improvements on Web UI, especially noticable in incident creation
• 💅 Delayed execution of Workflows now support less than 1 min time increments (e.g. wait 10 seconds)
• 💅 Default Slack channel names use a sequential ID instead of UUID when there is a duplicate to keep name cleaner
• 💅 UI improvement to show whenever a Workflow fails making it more obvious for users where to debug
• 🐛 Fixed issue where modifying mitigate timestamp saved but did not refresh the UI
• 🐛 Fixed issue where some Workflows occassionally double triggered
• 🐛 Fixed issue where Linear priorities were not loading when configuring and mapping to Linear
• 🐛 Fixed issue where Linear ticket generation did not show up in dedicated incident channel when created

🍫 API First and Infrastructure as Code Ready

Our API is now stable and using OpenAPI Specification. This will allow you to programmatically control the platform.

As an API-first company, everything you can do in the UI can be done via our REST APIs without clicking around. View our documentation here.

Now, integrate into existing Infrastructure as Code workflows or build new ones with Rootly.

The use cases are endless. For example:

• Create new incidents automatically from internal tools alerting (e.g. SLOs)
• Export and offload incident metrics to your BI tool of choice
• Automate updating services and creating new teams

Have a custom use case or integration in mind with our API? Reach out to support@rootly.io or on Slack and we'll help you build it.

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 Ability to specify which fields are required and optional at incident creation time on Slack, previously was only optional by default
• 🆕 Pinning messages to incident timeline displays who sent the message instead of who pinned
• 🆕 Ability to sort and reorder Workflows, making it easier to stay organized
• 🆕 Redesigned our own Rootly internal admin to make it easier to support customers
• 🆕 Built internal tools to support wiping demo data easily for customers that are done testing and moving over to production
• 💅 Cleaned up how selecting marking incident as Mitigated and Resolved looks in Slack
• 💅 Incident timeline now displays system messages coming from Rootly instead of who created the incident
• 💅 Link incident variables to new documentation, stay tuned for V2 where you'll no longer need to leave Rootly to browse
• 🐛 Fixed issue where scheduled maintenance windows would occasionally display as an active incident in UI only
• 🐛 Fixed issue where action items created in Rootly sometimes did not get created in Linear
• 🐛 Fixed issue where Zoom room links were not getting attached to incident notification emails
• 🐛 Fixed issue in Pulses (used for deploy tracking) would occasionally display duplicates

🏭 Slack Enterprise Grid & Multi-Workspace Ready

We are excited to announce Rootly is the only incident management platform that is Slack Enterprise Grid ready.

Our support for Slack Enterprise Grid means organizations with multiple workspaces can unify how they manage incidents.

What does this mean for multi-workspace customers?

• Ability to create incidents from any workspace without needing to switch
• Users are seamlessly redirected to the incident channel after creating, no manual switching required
• Continue using /rootly commands from any workspace
• Get notified of incidents across all workspaces (through shared channels)
• All Workflows support multi-workspaces (e.g. page team in workspace A and B)
• Workaround locked down Slack permissions for creating new channels with incident specific workspaces

In Action

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 New Task in Workflows that allows you to invite Teams to incidents
• 🆕 Display who pinned events to the incident timeline
• 🆕 Added granular trigger events for Workflows beyond incident_updated, such as any variable like severity_updated, teams_updated, status_updated, and more
• 💅 UI improvements in Workflows that make adding Tasks more obvious
• 💅 UI improvements to status pages that ensure a status page has been selected first before publishing
• 💅 UI improvements to how Task names were labeled inside of Workflows to be even more clear
• 💅 Users that are logged into rootly.com they are automatically redirected to the Dashboard
• 🐛 Fixed issue where logging into PagerDuty via SSO put users in an endless loop
• 🐛 Fixed issue where Workflow runs where mislabeled as failed when it was actually canceled
• 🐛 Fixed issue where the incident variable {{ incident.title }} did not populate properly
• 🐛 Fixed issue with Email integration where sending an email did not always trigger an incident
• 🐛 Fixed issue with Pulses where we weren't properly ingesting team variables in some cases

⚡Quick Start Shortcuts

We are introducing a faster way to get started with Rootly.

Whenever you type /rootly and hit enter, we will populate the most popular shortcuts to help you get started.

The command is context aware and will show different results depending on what channel you are in.

Running /rootly in non-incident channels

Purposefully designed to help you create incidents faster and learn about Rootly.

• Create Incident - declare an incident
• All Commands - all available /rootly commands to pick from
• Open Tutorial - getting started guide
• Learn More - custom redirect to your 1-pager otherwise goes to docs.rootly.com

Running /rootly in incident channels

Purposefully designed to help you manage and move incidents along after they've been declared right at your finger tips.

• Add Summary - periodically summarize the latest customer impact
• Escalate - directly page someone on e.g. PagerDuty, OpsGenie
• Resolve - mark the incident as resolved
• Update Incident - edit incident attributes such as severity or service impact
• All Commands - all available /rootly commands to pick from

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 Introduced suite of new tools that monitors and tests Slack app functionality that alerts us even earlier
• 🆕 Page a team via PagerDuty or Opsgenie through Workflows whenever a team is added to the incident
• 🆕 Custom redirect for any Learn More button inside of Rootly (e.g. to your internal 1-pager)
• 🆕 Select incident causes from the Postmortem tab even if you have a Confluence or Google Docs integrated
• 💅 Improved method to remove Workflows from database record when users requests deletion
• 💅 Faster paging via VictorOps that requests one less call to their API
• 💅 Renamed Genius to Workflows inside of the incident overview section
• 💅 Improved test coverage for when a Workflow fails and outputs error to user and notifies us via Sentry
• 💅 Updated walk-through content on /rootly tutorial
• 💅 Update branding for Google Docs integration inside of Slack
• 💅 Renamed the project management integration Clubhouse to Shortcut
• 💅 Added incident title to your Chrome tab instead of the generic incidents label, easier to browse with multiple Rootly tabs open
• 🐛 Fixed issue where Slack channel not notified if Confluence or Google Doc callback misfires
• 🐛 Fixed issue where Confluence did not load all pages when encountering > 100 space keys
• 🐛 Fixed typo for importing Confluence playbooks
• 🐛 Fixed issue where auto resolve task in Workflows would be inconsistent
• 🐛 Fixed issue where alerting tools like PagerDuty would occasionally post duplicate alerts in the alerts channel

🤫 Shhh, Keep It Private (Incidents)

We are excited to release the ability to create incidents as Private.

Common use cases are for security or other sensitive incidents that you may not want broadcast to the entire company.

Whenever a Private incident is triggered, we create a private channel, silence notifications, and hide it in the Web Dashboard.

We give you a powerful suite of features to configure and control access. We also ensure Private and Public incidents can co-exist seamlessly.

• Create Private incidents from Web or Slack
• On a per incident basis, choose if you want to create incident as Private
• Only Rootly admins can see or access on Web Dashboard
• Spins up private incident channel on Slack
• Notifications to your global #incidents channel are muted
• Any Private incidents are tagged with 🔒 Private

In Action

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 New Task in Workflows that allows you to rename your incident channel on Slack
• 🆕 Use your Jira ticket number/slug as your incident channel title in Slack - syntax {{incident.jira_issue_url | split: "/" | last}}
• 🆕 New coat of paint on rootly.com/demo with detailed walk-through video
• 🆕 New Task in Workflows that allows you to change incident states (e.g. auto resolve incident if inactivity for 24hrs)
• 💅 Zoom integration no longer relies on a user credentials to start the meeting
• 💅 Beta features get an appropriate (beta) tag to give customers a heads up
• 💅 Any time selector now includes UTC such as organizational timezone
• 💅 Cleaned up Google Meet UI in Slack to reduce visual clutter
• 💅 Auto resolve setting migrated out of organizational settings and into Workflows
• 🐛 Fixed issue where duplicate title names could not be used for Workflow names
• 🐛 Fixed issue where scheduled maintenance would incorrectly display warning message to resolve incident
• 🐛 Fixed issue where auto archive Slack channels occasionally didn't work
• 🐛 Fixed issue where Workflows occasionally did not repeat themselves
• 🐛 Fixed issue where action items did not want to be created as Jira subtasks for some customers

🤑 Measuring Incident Cost

We are introducing the ability to quantify incident cost. Our customers are looking for a way at quick glance see the estimated and aggregate cost of incidents.

Although there are numerous variables that contribute to this calculation, we are starting with estimated revenue loss.

This will look at your average cost per minute multiplied by duration of the incident.

• Enabled optionally in Organization Settings where you can configure variables
• Displayed in both Metrics tab and on each individual incident in Rootly.com
• Calculation can be based on time to mitigation and/or resolution
• Shows aggregate view (e.g. average cost per month) and per incident basis
• Export metrics out via CSV, JSON, API, or contact support@rootly.io for custom export builds
• Coming soon - time tracking and developer productivity costs, stay tuned!

In Action

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 If you import services via PagerDuty, we now run a daily sync to see if more were added, we also check for duplicates
• 🆕 Marking an incident on Rootly as resolved also are reflected in PagerDuty
• 🆕 Auto scrolling added to all pages such as services to make drag and drop easier
• 🆕 When starting to type /rootly the suggested text includes popular commands such as new, update, resolve, and help
• 💅 Organizations with lots of spaces in Confluence now load faster when integrating for the first-time
• 💅 We persist the user and remember who you selected last to make editing team memberships easier
• 💅 Rebranding Genius Workflows to just Workflows to provide greater clarity around what it does
• 💅 PagerDuty modal in Slack now better renders all users, especially for organizations that have hundreds to thousands
• 💅 After running /rootly connect we now automatically redirect users back to Slack
• 💅 Reduced visual clutter inside of Slack by removing unnecessary emojis (there is a thing as too much!)
• 💅 Cleaned up how Google Docs is displayed in Slack
• 🐛 Fixed issue where pinning events and messages to timeline were delayed
• 🐛 Fixed typos a few typos inside of Slack and integrations
• 🐛 Fixed issue in Confluence when changing the space key did not dynamically update list of pages
• 🐛 Fixed issue where some icons were broken after the switch to Rootly.com
• 🐛 Fixed issue where severity name occasionally rendered the slug instead of display name

🌐 Saying Hello to Rootly.com

Our Rootly.io domain served us well but its time for a little change. Many of our eagle eyed customers might have noticed we rebranded to Rootly.com over the weekend.

It took us a bit to get this domain but we are officially swapping over. But don't worry. If you've shared Rootly.io links internally and with your customers, they will continue to redirect.

Now that is out of the way, exciting and long awaited features below! 👇

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 Ability to re-order any component (severity, service, role, etc.) inside of Rootly. Now you can display what comes up first!
• 🆕 Introduced a new events system for handling callbacks with third party integrations that dramatically improves reliability
• 🆕 Made clearer in Slack that if you have more than 2 roles that there are more to be assigned
• 💅 Refactored Confluence and Google Doc to generate prettier docs by default
• 💅 Pinning items to incident timeline are based on when the message occurred instead of when it was pinned
• 💅 Create incidents on Web without needing to attach a severity, all fields are now optional similar to Slack
• 💅 Organizations with over 500+ PagerDuty/Opsgenie users now load faster in Slack when needing to manually escalate
• 💅 New /rootly tutorial guidance for updating the incident summary
• 💅 Pinning long messages with line breaks to incident timeline are formatted appropriately instead of one long string
• 🐛 Fixed issue where using Functionalities weren't triggering playbooks consistently
• 🐛 Fixed issue where postmortems written in Rootly occassionally didn't save correctly
• 🐛 Fixed issue where our Workflows weren't checking conditions were satisfied after incident was resolved

📟 Paging on Autopilot, Stop Wondering Who is On-Call

Alerting solutions like PagerDuty and Opsgenie are an integral part of our customers workflow. We are making it even easier to page the right people whenever you are tackling an incident, without wondering who is on-call.

We are introducing a new Task inside of our Automated Genius Workflow where you can automatically page people, team, or escalation policy depending on the condition of an incident. Some example use cases are page Infrastructure whenever a postgres-db incident occurs or page IMOC for every incident.

• Works with any alerting solution such as PagerDuty and Opsgenie
• Removes cognitive overhead and burden of wondering who to page during an incident as its automated
• Easy to configure with drag and drop editor in seconds
• No more wondering or fumbling with who has access to PagerDuty or Opsgenie logins

In Action

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 New configurations for incident creation module on Web that can now mirror Slack
• 🆕 All incident titles are assigned incremental numbers (e.g. #771) to more easily identify especially when duplicate sounding titles, similar to Jira
• 🆕 Ability to require users to connect their Slack accounts at sign up with new setting in Slack integration, no need for /rootly connect
• 🆕 Genius Workflow output in Slack is refactored to be less chatty to put more emphases on the output instead
• 💅 Improved UI navigation to Integrations is more accessible
• 💅 Added option to assign myself in top of roles drop down on Slack instead of searching for your own name
• 💅 Updated welcome email template that better guides users to install Rootly and declare their first incident
• 💅 Genius Workflow output on timeline is much cleaner looking
• 💅 Better support rendering code snippets in incident timeline when pinned on Slack
• 🐛 Fixed issue where status page timestamps were duplicated
• 🐛 Fixed issue where sometimes Jira tickets were inconsistently created
• 🐛 Fixed issue where some users experienced slower updates in the Slack overview message

We 💛 Google Docs

Many of our customers currently use Google Docs to write their postmortems. They enjoy the tooling for it's superior collaboration, ease of use, and familiarity as usually their entire company runs on it. However, when it comes to writing postmortems, although they prefer Google Docs, it's largely a manual process.

We are introducing our integration with Google Docs to automatically generate your postmortem after the incident is resolved. By enabling your Google Docs integration, Rootly will:

• Create a Google Doc under you desired Drive folder
• Populate the doc with a postmortem template as defined inside of Rootly (e.g. 5 whys)
• Populate incident metadata (e.g. incident title, severity, services impacted, resolution time, etc.)
• Generate incident timeline, no more copy-pasting from Slack!
• Disable native Rootly Dashboard postmortem experience and instead point users to Google Docs

In Action

🌝 New & Improved

• 🆕 Added a brand new Resources tab on the Rootly website. Everything from the hottest SRE jobs to our incident management blog!
• 🆕 Added a Genius Workflow task for auto archiving incident Slack channels
• 🆕 Export your incidents as a CSV
• 🆕 Added copy to clipboard option for postmortem timeline and incident data
• 🆕 After incident is resolved, users are prompted to edit their postmortem more explicitly
• 💅 Improved load times on Rootly Dashboard
• 💅 Improved reliability of PagerDuty integration that includes multiple redundancies
• 💅 Zoom, Google Meet, and other video conferencing options are globally turned on/off instead of per incident
• 🐛 Fixed issue where you could not unassign a user from an incident role in Slack
• 🐛 Fixed typos in /rootly tutorial guide and in the Rootly Dashboard
• 🐛 Fixed bug where /rootly tutorial would not work for Slack users who had not linked their Rootly accounts yet
• 🐛 Fixed duplicate tags for key:value pairs that would occasionally pop up