cloudparts

Rootly

Incident response from Slack, Microsoft Teams or Google Chat, with on-call paging, status pages, retrospectives and an AI SRE agent, configurable almost entirely through a Terraform provider.

What it is
Incident management,On-call
Type
Commercial product
Made by
Rootly, Inc.
License
Proprietary
Facts checked
24 October 2026
Website

What it is

Rootly runs the incident lifecycle from chat. Alerts from tools such as Datadog, Grafana, Sentry or any webhook can open an incident or attach to one, or someone declares it by hand in Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat or the web UI. Each incident has a status (open, in triage, mitigated, resolved), a severity, affected services, an incident commander and other roles, and a timeline that records what happened. Workflows do the coordination: each has trigger events, run conditions and an ordered list of actions, such as creating the incident channel, opening a Zoom or Google Meet bridge, filing a Jira or Linear ticket, paging a team, reminding the commander to update the status page or starting the retrospective document.

Rootly On-Call is its paging side. Schedules handle rotations, primary and secondary layers, business hours, holidays and overrides; escalation policies keep notifying people by voice, SMS, push, Slack, Teams or email until someone acknowledges; live call routing turns a phone call into a page, and heartbeats catch jobs that stop reporting. Rootly also hosts status pages, keeps a service catalog and offers an AI SRE that proposes probable root causes with evidence and draft fixes. An official Terraform provider with over 200 resources covers severities, services, schedules, escalation policies, alert routes, workflows and status pages, plus an API, CLI and MCP server.

Each product is priced per user: Incident Response (with status pages and retrospectives) is $20 a month and On-Call another $20, while AI SRE and Enterprise are quoted. There is no free plan; trials usually last two weeks, and startups can get up to half off.

Why teams pick it

  • Works in Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Chat, so teams on any of the three can run incidents from chat
  • Configuration as code: the Terraform provider covers nearly every object, from severities and forms to schedules and individual workflow tasks
  • Workflows with explicit triggers, conditions and ordered actions automate the process around an incident, not just the paging
  • Response and paging are separate products, so a team can keep PagerDuty for paging and use Rootly only for running incidents, or switch both

Watch out for

  • Proprietary SaaS with no self-hosted version and no free plan, only a trial
  • Per-user pricing doubles to $40 a month for people who need both incident response and on-call, and AI SRE is priced separately on request
  • The standard tier caps schedules and escalation policies at 20 and live-call phone numbers at 1; SCIM, audit logs, private incidents and custom retention need Enterprise
  • Workflows are flexible but become a rule set of their own to maintain: the Terraform provider alone has 132 workflow task types

Alternatives

What all incident management have in common →Compare side by side →
incident.ioCommercialIncident response run from Slack or Microsoft Teams, with its own on-call paging, status pages and an AI agent that investigates, sold as one SaaS priced per user.

How it fits with other technologies

Severities and a weekly on-call rotation, managed with the Rootly Terraform provider · hcl

terraform {
  required_providers {
    rootly = { source = "rootlyhq/rootly", version = "~> 5.10" }
  }
}
provider "rootly" {}  # reads ROOTLY_API_TOKEN

resource "rootly_severity" "sev1" {
  name  = "SEV1"
  color = "#FFA500"
}

resource "rootly_schedule" "platform" {
  name = "Platform On-Call"
}

resource "rootly_schedule_rotation" "weekly" {
  schedule_id = rootly_schedule.platform.id
  name        = "Weekly Rotation"
}

resource "rootly_schedule_rotation_user" "alice" {
  schedule_rotation_id = rootly_schedule_rotation.weekly.id
  user_id              = "alice-user-id"
  position             = 0
}

See it in a real stack

No architecture uses Rootly yet. Drop it into the playground and wire it up yourself.Open playground →
Where it came from2018–2026

Quentin Rousseau was a site reliability engineer at Instacart from 2015 to 2018, while it grew from hundreds of orders a day to thousands. He kept seeing the same patterns in how people responded to incidents, and after leaving he started a side project to run incident response inside Slack. JJ Tang, who had led product work at Instacart, joined him, and the pair took Rootly through Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 batch.

In July 2021 Rootly raised a $3.2 million seed led by XYZ Venture Capital, with 8VC and Y Combinator. It had fewer than ten people and a simple pitch: “we want people to manage and resolve incidents directly in Slack.” The early product connected responders to Jira, Zendesk, Datadog and PagerDuty from the channel and assembled the incident report from the conversation in the background.

A $12 million Series A led by Renegade Partners followed in August 2023, bringing total funding to $15.2 million; customers including Canva, Nvidia and TripAdvisor were then handling over 60,000 incidents a year through it. Rootly then grew beyond running incidents: its own on-call paging (shipping updates by 2024), status pages, retrospectives and an AI SRE agent, and in 2026 paging delivered straight into Slack DMs.

Why it’s built this way

Run the incident in chat
Responders were already talking in Slack during outages; doing the coordination there, and building the report from that conversation, removes the need to switch tools.
Integrate with paging tools first, build paging later
The 2021 product pulled responders in through PagerDuty from the incident channel instead of paging them itself. Its own on-call came later, for teams that wanted one product instead of two.
Expose almost everything through a Terraform provider
Incident processes change and need review like code. Declaring severities, schedules and workflows in Terraform keeps them versioned and repeatable across teams.

Timeline

  1. 2018

    Quentin Rousseau leaves Instacart’s SRE team; a side project he starts afterwards becomes Rootly

  2. 2021

    Y Combinator Summer 2021; $3.2M seed led by XYZ Venture Capital in July

  3. 2023

    $12M Series A led by Renegade Partners in August; 60,000+ incidents a year across customers

  4. 2024

    Rootly On-Call ships shift reminders and other paging features

  5. 2026

    Slack-native on-call paging in February

Sources7 · facts checked 24 October 2026

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