Rootly has announced an incident response and management tool called Rootly On-Call, that aims to help teams deal with incidents quicker and more effectively. In this episode, Ashley Sawatsky, Incident Response & Reliability Advocate at Rootly, discusses the tool, its features, and how it is helping to streamline processes and reduce manual effort. Sawatsky says, “We support the incident response process end to end from receiving a page that something’s broken all the way through to running a retrospective after you resolve the incident.”

Incident response and management tool, Rootly On Call, and its competitive edge over PagerDuty

• Sawatsky introduces us to Rootly On-Call, an on-call incident management tool that supports the process from end to end. She explains how the tool enables teams to manage incidents entirely within Slack.
• Sawatsky explains what sets Rootly On-Call apart from competitor PagerDuty, saying customers who wanted more consolidated tooling and PagerDuty is an expensive, standalone tool that does not help resolve issues.
• Incident management involves more than just paging alerts, it’s a coordinated effort involving multiple teams and stakeholders.
• Sawatsky talks about the challenges of incident management and how Rootly On-Call aims to streamline processes to simplify incident management and reduce manual effort.

Incident management tooling, AI, and innovation in the industry

• Sawatsky discusses the integration of AI into their product, highlighting its “copilot” function. She explains how the AI feature supports natural language processing, allowing users to ask questions or request information within incident channels.
• Sawatsky talks about the maturity of the incident management market saying that there is still significant potential for growth and development in incident management tools, highlighting the ongoing innovation in the space.
• Incident management responsibilities typically fall on SRE teams but Sawatsky tells us about the other teams that may be involved.
• Sawatsky attributes Rootly’s edge over its competitors to its focus on the enterprises and the features they need. She shares some of their most notable customers like NVIDIA and Canva.
• Rootly’s focus for the coming year is on making their AI features more robust and working on Rootly On-Call, which is currently in v1.

Guest: Ashley Sawatsky (LinkedIn)
Company: Rootly (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.