We believe the best tools are simple but powerful. A user interface should show you the info you need for the task you’re accomplishing, without distracting extraneous information. This is why we’re constantly challenging ourselves to make the notoriously complex work of managing incidents a simple experience, no matter how technical you are or how much experience you have.
This week, we refreshed our UI to be even simpler, cleaner, and more beautiful with several improvements to navigation and page displays. Here’s a look at what’s new:
The New Navigation Bar
The first change you’ll probably notice is the updated left-hand navigation bar. Here’s what we did:
- Reduced the options within the bar so you can see the full navigation menu without scrolling—not to worry, it’s still easy to get wherever you need to go. More on that in the next section.
- Organized navigation into sections that mirror the flow of an incident (Respond, Learn, and Modify) for more logical grouping.
- Made the menu collapsible to free up more screen real estate when you’re not using it.
If you’re an avid Rootly user, you might already be wondering “Where do I find Integrations?” or “What about Pulses?”. We got you. Allow us to introduce the new Configuration section:
Configuration
When you click Configuration from the navigation bar, instead of a large pop-up menu like before, you'll now be taken to a new screen—the Configuration section of Rootly. This is where you’ll find any settings that aren’t in the main navigation bar, starting with core configurations like your Slack integration, incident roles, severities, and so on. As you move down the list, you reach the more advanced configuration options like other third-party integrations and webhooks.
But we didn’t just move these to a new part of the UI and call it a day. Each configuration page comes with education and best practices built in. Let’s look at severities as an example:
The graphic at the top of the page explains what Severities are and how they’re used—both in incidents in general, and specifically within Rootly. Above the editor, there’s a recommendation to help reduce common pitfalls that new incident response teams encounter. Finally, while you can remove or edit any severity level you like and include your own names and definitions, Rootly comes pre-configured with industry standard severity levels so new users can hit the ground running and explore deeper customization as their processes mature.
We've made a handful of other changes as well, like cleaning up the Incident Details section on Incident pages, and an improved view of Service Catalogs within the Configurations section. Want a quick tour of all these updates? Let our CEO, JJ, show you around:
🌝 New & Improved
🆕 Non-corporate emails are now accepted as secondary user notification methods for Rootly On-Call.
💅 Invite to Slack Channel workflow action now supports freeform Liquid input into Channel field.
💅 Expanded API and Terraform support to allow a Rootly Team to be linked to a PagerDuty Service.
💅 Additional typographic symbols are now supported in rich text styled Summary field.
🐛 Backfilled Jira tickets now stores all reference values that links a follow-up action item to the Jira ticket.
🐛 Fixed issue with users unable to SSO into Rootly’s mobile app via Azure.
🐛 Fixed intermittent issue with “Test Notifications” feature not triggering test pages to Rootly’s mobile app.