🤖 Ask Rootly AI (+ More New AI Features!)

Ask Rootly AI (+ More New AI Features!)

Last week we gave you a teaser of our new AI features with the AI Editor. Today we’re excited to introduce even more AI features that make getting & sharing context in incidents easier than ever! As of today, Rootly customers can enable any of these features by clicking “Rootly AI” in the sidebar of your web dashboard. You’re in control of exactly how you want to use AI—you can enable any or all of the features and disable at any time.

Here’s a closer look at the AI features launching today:

Ask Rootly AI

Don’t waste your time scrolling to find the info you’re looking for. Just tag @Rootly in Slack or use the Ask Anything tab of the Incident page in Web and ask a question about the current incident. It can surface information for you or use context from the incident to perform tasks like drafting a status page update.

AI-Generated Incident Titles

As an incident is emerging, there’s no time to think about fancy titles. In many cases you don’t yet have a clear understanding of what’s broken yet. That’s why we introduced automatic incident titles through custom word banks. We’re taking this idea to the next level with AI. You can have Rootly AI suggest titles based on what’s known about the incident. You can get a suggested AI title whenever you need it; it’ll be refreshed based on the most recent understanding of the incident.

Powerful AI Summarization

Keeping an updated incident summary is key to ensuring the current status and progress of the incident are clear to everyone involved. This is typically a manual task taken care of by the Scribe or Commander, leaving room for delays and human error. Now, Rootly AI can write and update your incident summary for you so you can focus on pushing towards resolution. Getting lost in the scrollback of a fast-moving incident? Not to worry, you can also type /rootly catch up at any time to generate a summary and timeline of the incident so far.

/Rootly Resolve

Rootly AI can use generative AI to write a suggested mitigation and resolution summary for you. It will pick up the most relevant events in the incident’s history and track them until the resolution by the team.

Ready to get started?

Admins can log into Rootly and enable AI features from the Rootly AI link in your navigation menu. You’ll be prompted to update your Slack integration to start using Rootly AI in Slack. Updating and reinstalling Slack won't change your existing configurations or workflows, and usually, a Slack workspace admin needs to carry out this process. After the update, you won't be opted into any new settings automatically.

Check out the AI documentation for details on using Rootly AI.


Rootly AI Editor: Fix Typos, Grammatical Errors, and Wordy Text Instantly

✏️ Rootly AI Editor: Fix Typos, Grammatical Errors, and Wordy Text Instantly

Perfect grammar and prose are low on the list of priorities when you have an incident to resolve. Every second counts in incident response, so we’ve made it easy to perfect your text in Rootly automatically with a click. Wherever you edit text in the Rootly web UI, you can highlight your text and our AI Editor will clean it up for you. You can tell it exactly what you’d like help with:

  • Clean up spelling and grammar
  • Simplify language
  • Make it longer
  • Make it shorter

Here’s a quick look at how the AI Editor can clean up a messy timeline entry:


🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Added the ability to automatically update Priority field in PagerDuty via workflows.
💅 Ability to edit a Google Doc via iframe is back! You can now find it embedded in the Write the Retrospective Document step of your configurable retrospective steps.
💅 Incident-level permissions are now reflected on the New Incident Form in Slack. Previously, we allowed full incident creation capabilities for all users in Slack. Now, each user’s permissions will be reflected during incident creation via Slack as well.
🐛 Fixed inability to open Playbooks that surface when certain incident causes are selected.
🐛 Fixed intermittent occurrence of inability to add Teams.
🐛 Fixed issue with custom fields not showing up on Slack forms as required fields.
🐛 Fixed inability to save the Jira Ticket for Action Items toggle switch on Jira Smart Defaults.


📊 Dashboard Sharing Permissions

📊 Dashboard Sharing Permissions

Controlling who can access your incident data is paramount, especially for large organizations. You might have dashboards which contain information only relevant to a specific team, or some you only want accessible to Executives, etc. With our Dashboard Sharing settings, this is no problem.

When you create a new dashboard, it will be private by default—meaning it will be only accessible by you unless you choose to share it using the Share button in the top right. From there, you can select whether you want to share it with your full team or specific individuals, and select their level of access to any of the options below:

Viewer: Can view the dashboard but can’t make any changes.
Editor: Can view the dashboard and add/remove/edit panels within it.
Manager: Can view the dashboard, edit its content, and update sharing settings.

There’s also an option to create a public link to view, which is useful for teams who want to share specific dashboards with their customers or other stakeholders outside of the organization.

🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Added new setting to allow users to not to be tagged in the initial Slack block following an incident role assignment. This will help quiet down the notifications to the assigned users. You can access this new setting by going to Account Settings > Notifications > When your user appears in the initial incident message mention your user (ex. @rootly_bot)
💅 Tutorial incidents is now unlocked for ALL users - even users without full incident permissions. New users can learn the basic Rootly operations by running the /rootly tutorial command in Slack.
💅 Cleaned up inconsistent symbols used to indicate users’ Slack connection statuses. Now, users that have their Slack accounts connected will see a green check mark in the Slack Connected column on the Organization Settings > Members page.
🐛 Fixed required field asterisk (*) display issue on New Incident forms on Slack
🐛 Fixed issue with individual retrospective steps not auto-assigning to the specified incident roles
🐛 Fixed auto format issue on the names entered for Incident Permissions Sets
🐛 Fixed color distortion on Incident Insights heatmap shown on the Dashboard page.


✍️ Customize Your Wordbank for Automatic Incident Title Generation

✍️ Customize Your Wordbank for Automatic Incident Title Generation

No time to come up with an incident title? No problem. Using an auto-generated title allows you to spin up an incident as quickly as possible. Just leave the “Incident Title” field blank in the Incident Creation Form (web or Slack) and Rootly will automatically generate a random title for you using our built-in wordbank. You’ve probably seen these titles in our demos or in your own Rootly workspace. But here’s the fun part: you can now add or remove words to your wordbank to create your own custom title generator. Not only does this save you time from regenerating titles you’re not a fan of, it allows you to bring your organization’s personality into yet another part of your Rootly configuration. You can edit your incident's title at any time (just open the incident in Rootly and click the title to edit it), so it's easy to update it later on to better reflect a description of the incident for your records.

Customize your incident title generator in Rootly under Organization Settings > Advanced Settings > Automatic Incident Title Generator.

🌝 New & Improved

💅 Upgraded Zendesk alerts to include event_type and scenario as labels. Now you can perform more granular filtering on Alerts workflows.
💅 Added additional guard rails to prevent disabled workflows from being accidentally triggered. Previously, disabled workflows could still be triggered by Slack command and Trigger a Workflow action.
🐛 Fixed display bug on integrations page where the integration status is listed.
🐛 Fixed missing custom field values in CSV exports.
🐛 Fixed issue with CSV exports not respecting applied incident filters.
🐛 Fixed incorrect destination URL on public status page links.
🐛 Fixed inability to sort form fields via web UI.


🧠 Smart Defaults for Jira

🧠 Smart Defaults for Jira

Because we work with some of the largest and most complex enterprise use cases, our Jira integration goes deeper than the other tools on the market. In addition to bidirectional syncing for incidents and action items, you can integrate with multiple Jira instances and projects including on-prem, and enjoy fully customizable custom field mapping. As we continue to evolve this crucial integration, it’s key that we keep ease of use at the forefront of our product philosophy—this is where Smart Defaults come in. They’re our recommended default settings that come enabled out of the box so you can start syncing with with Jira with minimal setup. The result: we meet you where you are and help you level up along the way. 🤝

Here’s a look at what comes out of the box with Smart Defaults when you add Jira to Rootly:

  • Toggle options to specify which capabilities you want enabled. Want to sync all your incidents to Jira, but keep action items only in Rootly? No problem. You can toggle off “Create Jira subtask ticket for action items”.
  • Specify what 'Type' you’d like Jira tickets created as (e.g. Task, Subtask, Bug)
  • Specify the 'Status' should tickets be created as (“To Do” is our recommended default), or you can use a Workflow to update the Jira ticket status every time you update the status in Rootly.
  • Automatically bookmark Rootly-created Jira incident ticket in your incident Slack channel so it’s always easily accessible

These settings cover the vast majority of use cases for Jira syncing, but if you need to go deeper with custom field mapping, syncing across multiple projects, and more, our Workflows have you covered.

To get started using Jira with Rootly, read our Installation instructions here and check out the demo below for a walkthrough of the simple setup:


🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Jira transition webhooks can now be handled by Rootly. This is particularly useful if you only want to receive alerts whenever a Jira ticket changes status.
💅 Rootly Guided Tutorial can now be enabled/disabled under Organization Settings. If your team no longer requires the tutorial or you’d like to configure your own training procedure, you can now hide Rootly’s out-of-box tutorial from the UI.
💅 Improved Trigger Workflow modal behavior on web UI to return cleaner and more informative results.
💅 Improved display of dropdowns to better handle selections with longer texts. Now they will be wrapped instead of allowing horizontal scrolling.
🐛 Fixed sporadic occurrences of existing Slack channels unable to be converted to incident channels.
🐛 Fixed inability to export action items to Jira through the web UI.
🐛 Fixed issue with Jira Smart Defaults failing to save for Jira On-Prem integration.


🔌 The Rootly Plugin for Zendesk

🔌 The Rootly Plugin for Zendesk

Many of our customers already leverage our popular Zendesk integration for automatic ticket creation and syncing. Now, in addition to the Rootly Zendesk integration, you can bring Rootly right into Zendesk with our new plugin from the Zendesk Marketplace.

Customer support teams play a crucial role in identifying incidents as they emerge and keeping customers informed and reassured throughout the response. These teams work at a fast pace, meaning it’s imperative that they have the information they need to support customers at their fingertips. This is why our new Zendesk plugin is a must-have for Zendesk teams wanting to improve the customer experience during incidents. It brings important incident context to your frontline team with a searchable view of Rootly incidents directly within Zendesk. We've also seen that many teams rely on customer support to report potential incidents that observability and alerting systems don't catch. The Rootly plugin allows users to start an incident from within Zendesk, so emerging problems make it to on-call engineers as quickly as possible.

⏱️ Reduce MTTA (mean time to assemble) with the ability to declare Rootly incidents from within Zendesk.



🔎 Provide a source of truth regarding incidents for customer support staff with a searchable view of recent and related incidents from Rootly inside Zendesk.



📎 Attach tickets to new or existing Rootly incidents for efficient tracking of customer support volume related to incidents.



🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Added Slack command for easy subscription to any Rootly status pages in Slack channels. You can access each page-specific command by navigating to the specific Rootly status page and select Subscribe to Updates > Slack.
💅 Added loading spinner to all search bars across the platform to improve user experience. Now there is a clear indication of search in-progress when users use the search bar.
💅 Updated the Create Jira Subtask workflow action to allow multi-line text in the Description field.
💅 Updated the Create Notion Page and Update Notion Page workflow actions to allow the Title field to be customizable and able to accept Liquid syntax.
🐛 Fixed incorrect redirect issue with {{ incident.postmortem_short_url }} taking users to the Rootly landing page, instead of the retrospective.
🐛 Fixed the inability to delete workflow run conditions from existing workflows.


🪄 Rootly Retrospectives

🪄 Rootly Retrospectives

Rootly Retrospectives are configurable, customizable processes that allow you to define right-sized retrospectives based on severity, type, or teams involved in an incident. We created this feature with a few things in mind:

  • A retrospective is more than just a doc. It’s everything that takes place after an incident to surface and implement crucial post-incident learnings to improve your organization’s resiliency. With Rootly Retrospectives, you’re guided through the entire process. No guesswork.
  • When it comes to retros, one size doesn’t fit all. You can define and store multiple retrospective processes, which will be triggered based on pre-specified conditions, like the type, severity, or team owning the incident. You can also set conditions to automatically skip the retro (e.g. low severity or internal incidents), or to make the retro mandatory (e.g. critical, security, or customer-facing incidents).
  • Accountability and consistency is key. What good are action items that never get done? With Rootly Retrospectives, you can see all your action items in one place, including their progress, due date, and owner.
  • Retrospective data matters. Get high-level data at your fingertips about the health of your post-incident learning process. In the Retrospectives Index page, you’ll see how many incidents currently have overdue or incomplete retro steps, and the average time it takes you to complete the retrospective process. All of these are displayed against a 30-day rolling comparison, so you know whether you’re on the right track.

Check out this video demo for a tour of our Retrospectives features:


How it works:

  1. Start with our pre-configured Default retrospective or create your own. This process will be automatically prompted when you resolve an incident.
  2. Your retrospective doc and timeline will be created automatically in Rootly and the additional tool(s) of your choice (Notion, Confluence, Google Docs, etc.) You can manage and edit your doc templates under Configuration > Retrospectives.
  3. Create additional processes in Configuration > Retrospectives. Set the conditions for when you want the process to be used, and add/remove/edit steps as you see fit.
  4. Set criteria for when you want to auto-skip retrospectives or make them mandatory.
  5. When you resolve an incident, you’ll be automatically prompted to follow the appropriate retrospective process based on the incident's severity, team, or type.
  6. You can see a bird’s eye view of all of your open retrospectives and their associated steps in the Retrospectives Index (accessed by clicking “Retrospectives” in the left-hand navigation menu.) You can bulk edit and filter these.

🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Added message threading option for Get Pulses - Deploys & Changes workflow action. Now Pulses auto retrieved by workflows can be threaded under a parent message within an incident channel.
💅 Incident summary inputs via web UI now support rich text format.
💅 Action item summary field can now support URLs and hyperlinks.
💅 Backfilled incidents now have immediate access to the retrospectives tab. Teams no longer have to manually flip-flop the incident status to force a change to the Resolved state.
🐛 Updated incorrect webhook endpoint for Jira On-Prem integration.
🐛 Fixed the inability to create status page template for scheduled maintenances.


⚡ Command Palette: Lightning Fast Navigation with a Single Keyboard Command

⚡ Command Palette: Lightning Fast Navigation with a Single Keyboard Command

The Rootly web UI is neatly organized with a side panel of sections and pop-up menus outlining the contents of each page. But for even our most dedicated power users, memorizing every setting and feature within a robust UI is a tall order. That’s why we created the Command Palette—just press Command ⌘ + K to bring up a quick navigation portal that allows you to access any page in the Rootly web UI with a simple keyword search.

No more clicking around to figure out “Was that automation a workflow or a toggle setting?” or “Where do I go to edit Webhooks again?”. For new users, this means lack of familiarity with the UI won’t slow you down.

The Command Palette is also page aware—meaning it uses the page you’re on to order the results that make the most sense. For instance, if you’re on a specific incident’s page and you search for action items using a keyword, the Command Palette will pull results from that incident first.

Using ⌘+K searches across every part of Rootly, including your incidents, workflows, action items, integrations, and more. If it’s in the Rootly web UI, you can get to it from the Command Palette.

Happy searching!

🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Incident Title and Summary can now be edited directly in web UI, without having to first open the Edit Incident dialog.
🆕 Previously, when a Rootly resource is deleted and re-added, an UUID gets automatically appended to the slug value. Now, re-added Rootly resource slugs will remain consistent to their original slug value - simplifying custom mapping via Liquid variables.
💅 Enhanced search bar UX with visual in-progress indicator and auto search on deletion.
💅 Improved timestamp display on workflow runs to show times in both user-level and organization-level timezone settings.
🐛 Fixed inability to select a Slack User in Invite to Slack Channel workflow action for organizations that are integrated with Slack Enterprise Grid.
🐛 Fixed inability to de-select Ancestor page in Create Confluence Page workflow action.


Rootly Terraformer: Seamlessly Bring Workflows From Rootly’s UI to Terraform

☁️ Rootly Terraformer: Seamlessly Bring Workflows From Rootly’s UI to Terraform

Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool that lets you build, change, and version cloud and on-prem resources safely and efficiently. Rootly Terraformer is a CLI tool (installed via Homebrew) that auto-generates Terraform files (.tf) from your Rootly configurations—no more manually coding .tf files.

Most customers begin their Rootly journey using the Smart Default settings and some light customization within our web platform. However, as their deployment process matures, they may choose to set up multiple Rootly accounts designated for different environments. Deploying Rootly through Terraform allows customers to quickly mirror the configurations across multiple Rootly accounts. Now, Rootly Terraformer helps customers save significant time by removing the manual task of having to code each Rootly resource by hand.

If you want to manage your Rootly configuration through Terraform without coding the .tf files from scratch, you can simply generate them using Rootly Terraformer.

In this video, our Technical Support Engineer Shadab shows you how it works!


🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Introduced IncidentPermissionSets, IncidentPermissionSetsResources, and IncidentPermissionSetsBooleans services to enable granular incident permissions to be manageable via API
🆕 The display order of workflow folders can now be edited. This can be done graphically via the UI or systemically via WorkflowGroups API and rootly_workflow_group Terraform resource.
💅 User’s full name is now displayed on the incident timeline. Now there is no confusion when team members share the same first name.
💅 Repositioned search bar to be more visible for each configurable resource on the UI
🐛 Fixed inability to filter and sort incidents by severity at the same time. Now you can filter for specific serverities and then sort them from most to least severe.
🐛 Fixed display issue on “items per page” dropdown. Previously the clear button (‘X’) was blocking the selected value.


Smart Defaults for Slack Configuration

🤓 Smart Defaults for Slack Configuration

Setting up your Slack integration is the first thing we recommend for new Rootly customers. Rootly is ready to go, right out of the box, with built-in industry best practices for super simple, enterprise-ready incident management. We’re big on customization, so you can tweak your setup to suit your organization’s unique needs and processes—but wanting a tailored setup doesn’t mean you should have to start from scratch! Our guided self-serve onboarding helps you get up and running as quickly as possible, while allowing you to customize as you go. Here’s how we’re making this process easier using Smart Defaults:

  • We converted the existing set of default Slack Workflows into on/off toggle settings that you can access directly from your Slack Integration page. These come enabled by default for new users, so you can start using your Slack integration immediately.
  • We added some new options into the Slack Integrations settings, like the ability to auto-notify a specific group of users when channels will be auto-archived due to inactivity or after incident resolution.
  • You can now set your own Slack channel naming convention rules from the Slack Integration settings page.
  • We’ve added tooltips and education throughout the Slack Integration page to support new users through the setup process.
  • If you want to customize your Slack setup beyond the options provided as Smart Defaults in your Slack Integration settings, you can still create custom workflows for Slack using the Workflow Builder!

Here's a look at the Smart Reminders section of these Defaults:

Smart Reminders



For existing customers who have already set up their Slack integration, don’t worry—this update won’t mess with your existing workflows. You have access to the new Slack settings on your Slack Integration page, but they’re disabled by default so they don’t override or interfere with the workflows you have set up. If you prefer to manage your Slack automations directly from the new options in the Integrations page, you can enable them as you wish and disable any workflows that are no longer needed.

Here's a quick tour of the new Slack setup:


🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Custom forms can now be managed via the CustomForms API and rootly_custom_form resource in Terraform
🆕 Introduced a more user-friendly Slack Help modal. Use the /rootly help command to see the new interface!
💅 Unique IDs for each form field option is now displayed on the UI to help simplify Liquid syntaxing
💅 Implemented text wrapping on various pages (e.g. Services, Functionalities, etc.) to improve visual display on smaller screens.
🐛 Fixed inability to increment/decrement numeric fields by clicking up/down arrows on Slack modals.
🐛 Retrospective progress will automatically refresh following updates to each step. Users no longer have to force refresh to see the updated progress on retrospectives.



Rootly helps you respond to incidents faster as a team and learn to prevent them in the future.
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