Rootly Integration

Last updated: October 29, 2026

Span's Rootly integration brings your Rootly incidents into Span so they count toward your DORA metrics: Mean time to recover, Total incidents, Incidents / week, and Change failure rate, by team.

Why it matters

Connecting Rootly gives your engineering organization one view of reliability next to delivery metrics. You can see how incident load and recovery time change as teams ship faster, and compare teams, without exporting data by hand.

How it works

Span connects to Rootly's API with an API key and syncs about every 2 hours. For each incident, Span stores the title, summary, status, severity, created time, acknowledged time, resolved time, assigned users, the Rootly teams on the incident, and a link back to the incident in Rootly. Span also syncs Rootly users so it can link assignments to people in your Span roster.

Status and severity. Span maps Rootly values to its standard values by matching text in the name:

Rootly status contains

Span status

"resolved" or "mitigated"

resolved

"active"

open

Rootly severity contains

Span severity

"critical" or "high"

high

"medium"

medium

"low"

low

Values that don't match these patterns are kept but not normalized, so they may not appear correctly in filtered views. Status and severity don't change which incidents count in DORA metrics.

DORA metrics powered by Rootly:

Metric

How Span calculates it

Mean time to recover

From the incident's creation time in Rootly to its resolved time. View the average, P50, P75, P90, or max.

Total incidents and Incidents / week

Incidents created in the date range. Rootly incidents carry no environment in Span, so all of them count as production.

Change failure rate

Production incidents ÷ successful production deployments in the same range. Span doesn't link each incident to the deployment that caused it. Deployments come from Span's DORA API, not from Rootly.

These metrics are on the DORA page under Insights → Productivity → DORA, filterable by team and time range. Browse the incidents themselves in Catalog → Incidents.

Setup

Before you start, you need:

  • A Rootly API key with read access to incidents, users, teams, and incident roles.

  • The Manage Integrations permission in Span. Owners, Admins, and Integration Admins have it by default.

Generate a Rootly API key

  1. Log in to your Rootly account.

  2. Go to Account Settings → API Keys.

  3. Click Generate New API Key.

  4. Copy the key. Store it somewhere secure, because Rootly won't show it again.

Connect Rootly

  1. In Span, go to Settings → Integrations.

  2. Find Rootly and click Connect.

  3. Paste your Rootly API key and connect. Span checks the key with a test call to Rootly. If the key is invalid or lacks permissions, you'll see an error.

Map Rootly teams to Span teams

  1. Open the Rootly integration in Settings → Integrations and scroll to Team Mappings ("Map Span teams to Rootly teams").

  2. For each Span Team, select the matching Rootly Team.

  3. Click Save.

Each Rootly team maps to one Span team. Incidents from unmapped Rootly teams still sync and count in your organization total, but not under any team.

Things to know

  • Data syncs about every 2 hours. New incidents and status changes can take up to about 2 hours to appear. During an active incident, check Rootly directly.

  • MTTR starts when the incident is created in Rootly. If impact began earlier, Span's MTTR is shorter than the real outage. If an incident sat in triage, it's longer.

  • Unresolved incidents enter MTTR as 0 hours until they resolve, then with their full recovery time. They count in Total incidents and Change failure rate from the start.

  • Every status and severity counts. Span includes canceled, test, and low-severity incidents in its counts, so totals can be higher than Rootly's own reports.

  • Time to acknowledge. Span stores the acknowledged time on each incident. The DORA page reports recovery time, measured from creation to resolution.

  • Worked example. A Rootly incident is created at 09:00, mitigated at 09:40, and resolved at 10:30. Span records 1 hour 30 minutes toward MTTR. Its status containing "resolved" maps to resolved in Span.

Troubleshooting

  • "Invalid API key" on connect: check that you copied the full key without extra spaces and that it has read access to incidents and teams. Try generating a new key.

  • No incidents in Span: wait up to about 2 hours for the first sync, and check that your Rootly account has incidents.

  • Incidents missing from a team: map the relevant Rootly teams in Team Mappings. Each Rootly team can map to only one Span team; remove duplicates and save again.

  • Data stops updating: check that your Rootly API key hasn't been revoked or rotated and that Rootly is reachable.

Disconnecting. Go to Settings → Integrations, open Rootly, and disconnect. Incidents already synced stay in Span, and no new data is fetched.

Related articles

Mean Time To Recover (MTTR) Report

Change Failure Rate Report

How does the Incident.io integration work?

How to use the DORA API to send deployment activity to Span

Need help?

Contact your Span account team or reach out to support@span.app.