How SpotDraft replaced manual follow-ups with synced, measurable incident management on Rootly.

SpotDraft used to employ a person whose entire job was chasing people for incident updates. Not fixing incidents, chasing status, because their Slack threads and their Jira tickets didn't talk to each other, so a human had to be the sync layer between them. This worked for two or three active incidents. As the start-up grew, manual reconciling stood no chance. SpotDraft built real incident management on Rootly instead, synced Slack and Jira both ways so engineers work where they already are, and that follow-up job stopped needing to exist.

Slack threads, a Jira ticket, and one person chasing everyone

A customer would report a bug in Slack, the team would open a thread in a shared on-call channel, and create a Jira ticket alongside it. There was no single place to track what was happening or where, no way to clearly separate one incident from another in a crowded channel, and after ten days a thread might show some progress while everyone had lost track of where it actually lived.

As Darshan, Senior Manager of Product Support, SpotDraft said, “We had no system to track this; and as we scaled, the no. of incidents increased and a manual Slack thread process simply could not keep up.”  

Built with a partner who stayed hands-on

SpotDraft built its incident management on Rootly from the ground up in two phases: Incident response first, on-call more recently.

What stands out in Darshan's story is the partnership. When implementing Incident Response, a Rootly team member guided him on best practices while Rootly's opinionated defaults made it easy to build workflows and triggers end to end. Darshan calls it a game-changer. The workflows were intuitive enough that he refines and extends them himself instead of starting from scratch.

When it was time to roll out on-call, Darshan expected a company that had scaled as quickly as Rootly to offer little hands-on support. Instead, a Rootly team member joined a live session with him, walking through the setup step by step so he could confidently manage everything on his own.

The rollout was just as thoughtful. Rootly provided a one-page implementation guide, which Darshan expanded into a 10-page SOP before leading a session for engineering, support, and product teams on incident response and on-call workflows. The impact was immediate. The team understood the process, adopted it quickly, and saw the value from day one.

"The level of support and advice I received from Rootly is unmatched to any other vendor I’ve ever used."-Darshan S, Senior Manager of Product Support

What changed

Slack and Jira, finally in sync

When an incident is declared, Rootly automatically creates the Slack channel, brings in the right on-call engineers and teams, and creates the corresponding Jira ticket with all the relevant details. As production support mitigates the issue and engineering takes over, updates stay synchronized between Rootly and Jira. Engineers continue working in Jira as usual, while the incident record remains in sync automatically, no duplicate updates, no context switching.

No more chasing updates

By automating routing, syncing, and notifications, Rootly replaced the manual coordination layer between Jira and Slack. Alerts from Datadog, Sentry, and other monitoring tools now trigger incidents automatically, page the on-call engineer first, and escalate up to the VP of Engineering if a page is missed, continuing until someone acknowledges.

From no metrics to resolution times you can sell

For SpotDraft, this is where incident management translates into business value. Resolution time is a key differentiator, backed by premium and standard support tiers, contractual SLAs, and service credits if targets are missed. As Darshan puts it, fast resolution depends on having the right process in place, and before Rootly, SpotDraft had no structured incident management or reliable way to measure it.

Now, incidents are routed automatically to the right team with the right priority, responders follow a consistent process, and every incident is tracked from start to finish. So SpotDraft has clear visibility into resolution times, giving the team the operational discipline needed to consistently meet the SLAs its customers pay for.

Proof points (SpotDraft lightning round, 1–5)

• Stakeholder communications are more consistent: 5
• Time to first status update improved: 4
• Customers are happier: 4
• Engineering and support morale is better: 4

It's easy to run incident response with a Slack channel, a Jira ticket, and someone manually keeping everything in sync. That approach works, until it doesn't. As incident volume grows, manual coordination becomes a bottleneck, visibility disappears, and tracking resolution times becomes nearly impossible.

With Rootly, SpotDraft replaced manual coordination with automated workflows. Incidents route themselves, Jira stays in sync, on-call escalations happen automatically, and every incident produces the metrics the team needs. As incident volume scaled severalfold, the process scaled with it, without adding operational overhead.