Why Rootly · Part four of four
Making the case inside your company
You are convinced. Now your manager, security, and finance have to be. Here is what each one asks.
Making the case inside your company
On this page
Each of these objections is partly right. Agree with that part first; if you argue with it, you will lose the room.
“Our current tool works fine.”
Your team
It mostly does. Pages fire, retrospectives get written eventually, nobody is complaining loudly. Arguing with that is a losing position, because the person saying it is right.
The question worth asking instead is how much of the real work has quietly moved somewhere else: the side channel where coordination actually happens, the spreadsheet nobody updates, the thread that disappears after the incident closes. The tool still works. It just records a fraction of what happened, so every retrospective starts from an incomplete record and the team does not learn from one incident to the next.
“I regret not making the decision to switch earlier, instead of waiting until Opsgenie came to an end.”
“Migrating now would be too disruptive.”
Your manager
A fair concern: nobody wants to spend a quarter on a tooling migration. Take it seriously.
The distinction that matters is that switching is a one-time cost while staying is a recurring one. The audit is also free and read-only, so the disruption can be measured before anyone commits to it: you get a findings report on your own environment and keep it either way.
“Rootly was up and running inside a week and the first incident ran through perfectly, no manual cleanup. Our response SLA is locked at five minutes and nobody struggles to hit it.”
“We have already invested too much in this setup.”
Your tech lead
The custom workflows and the fifty integrations are real work, and dropping them feels wasteful. That work is already spent, but walking away from it still feels bad.
What is worth counting is the cost to keep them. Every workaround needs ongoing maintenance, and the person doing it usually is not in the meeting. List them, add up the time, and compare that to the one-time cost of migrating, not to zero.
“Every capability Rootly ships is one my team does not have to build. That is the whole value for me: We spend our time on security, not on the tooling that runs incident management.”
“Security will never approve it.”
Pre-empting your security team
This is the easiest one. Rootly is the incident platform chosen by companies whose entire business is security, and they ran this review before you did.
On the AI specifically: every connector is read-only, nothing happens without a person approving it, every claim links to the evidence behind it, and your incident data never trains anything for another customer. Your service map and incident history stay yours. A full security packet is available on request, and most reviews close in two to three weeks.
“Rootly turned our incident response into an operating system that scales: clearer ownership, faster resolution, stronger retros, and less reliance on heroics.”
“We are locked in for another fourteen months.”
Finance
Then talk to us anyway. Rootly buys out up to 12 months of a remaining PagerDuty contract, so you do not pay for both tools while you move.
Bring the contract and we will work out the arithmetic with you. This is usually the last real objection in the room, and we built the buyout so that a contract renewal does not stop you from switching once you have decided to.
“We cannot let an AI near production.”
Your security team and AI council
A sensible concern, and most vendors answer it with reassurance instead of specifics.
Here are the specifics. Every capability is opt-in per team. Every action is logged. Every claim links to the evidence under it, so you can check a result instead of taking it on trust. Nothing takes action without a human approving it, and the AI only does more on its own when you allow it.
You can also run the entire platform with all of it switched off. That is worth saying in the meeting.
“Having the AI Rootly summary feature allows us to quickly summarize what is happening in an incident and pass it to internal stakeholders.”
“Honestly, their tool looked easier.”
A colleague on the evaluation
This can sometimes feel true, and it is worth conceding rather than arguing with. Getting started can sometimes feel simpler elsewhere. All products have rough edges that product teams keep polishing, ours included. We will not tell you we are perfect, but we will bring you in on the changes we are proposing and on our roadmap.
What a first impression does not tell you is whether it stays easy as you grow, and who helps when it stops being easy. The pattern we hear from teams who moved is the same one: the tool was easy until their process outgrew it, and then they were on their own with it. A lot of our customers were a competitor’s customer first.
So the question worth putting back to the room is not which is easier to start. It is which is still easy at three times the size, with a second team that needs something different and a security review in the way.
“incident.io got us started, but innovation stalled, and kept putting basic things behind the next pricing tier.”
What to bring to the meeting
- The findings report from the audit
- An inventory of your own environment carries more weight than any vendor deck, and you keep it whether or not you switch.
- Your workaround list
- The scripts, bots, and spreadsheets holding the current process together, with a name against each one, and what the move does to each one.
- Pricing for what you need, in writing
- The three features you will need in eighteen months, and which plan includes each. For Rootly's AI the answer is one word: included.
The audit costs nothing and the findings report is yours either way.
The switching guide
- The caseWhy teams switch to RootlyWhat you get, what teams who switched say changed, and how Rootly compares.
- Part twoHow to run a pilot that gives a real answerScope, length, the exit criteria to write down first, and the questions to ask every vendor, us included.
- Part threeHow a migration to Rootly runsThe audit, the phased rollout, what we cannot promise, and what it costs your team.
- Part fourMaking the case inside your companySeven conversations a champion has to win, and how to answer each one.