Rootly Integration

Last updated: May 13, 2026

Category: Integrations → Incident Management

Overview

Span's Rootly integration connects your Rootly incident management instance to Span, giving your engineering organization a unified view of reliability alongside your development metrics. Once connected, Span automatically syncs incident data to power DORA reliability metrics, including Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR), Incident Frequency, and Change Failure Rate, all broken down by team, severity, and time period.

Prerequisites

Before connecting Rootly, make sure you have:

  • A Rootly API Key with read access to incidents, users, and teams (see Generating a Rootly API Key below)

  • The Manage Integrations permission in Span. Your Org Admin can grant this via a dedicated Integrations Admin role.

Connecting Rootly

  1. In Span, navigate to Organization Settings → Integrations.

  2. Find Rootly in the integrations list and click Connect.

  3. In the dialog that appears, paste your Rootly API Key.

  4. Click Connect. Span will immediately validate the key by making a test call to the Rootly API.

    • If successful, the integration status will update to Connected.

    • If the key is invalid or lacks permissions, you'll see an error. Double-check the key and try again.

Generating 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 and paste it into Span. Store it somewhere secure, as it will not be shown again.

The API key requires read access to the following Rootly resources:

Resource

Required For

Incidents

Core incident data sync

Users

Linking incidents to people

Teams

Team mapping configuration

Incident Roles

Role assignments per incident

Configuring Team Mappings

Team mappings allow Span to associate Rootly incidents with your Span teams, enabling team-level incident dashboards and metrics.

  1. After connecting, navigate to Organization Settings → Integrations → Rootly.

  2. Scroll to the Team Mappings section.

  3. You'll see a two-column table:

    • Left column: your Span teams

    • Right column: a dropdown to select the corresponding Rootly team

  4. Select a Rootly team for each Span team you want to track incidents for.

  5. Click Save.

Note: Team mappings are one-to-one. A Rootly team can only be mapped to a single Span team. Incidents from unmapped Rootly teams will still sync but will not appear in team-level views.

What Data Is Synced

Span syncs two data streams from Rootly on a rolling schedule:

Incidents

Every incident is synced with the following information:

Field

Description

Title & Summary

The incident name and description

Status

Normalized to: open, acknowledged, resolved, or closed

Severity

Normalized to: high, medium, or low

Lifecycle Timestamps

created_at, acknowledged_at, mitigated_at, resolved_at, closed_at

Assigned Users

Who created, triaged, mitigated, resolved, and closed the incident

Incident Roles

Named role assignments (e.g., Incident Commander, Responder)

Groups / Teams

Which Rootly teams were associated with the incident

Labels

Any incident labels or tags

URL

Direct link back to the incident in Rootly

Users

Rootly user accounts are synced to link incident assignments to people in your Span roster.

Severity & Status Normalization

Rootly severities and statuses are mapped to Span's standard values using pattern matching:

Severity:

Rootly Severity

Span Value

Contains "critical" or "high"

high

Contains "medium"

medium

Contains "low"

low

Status:

Rootly Status

Span Value

Contains "open"

open

Contains "acknowledge"

acknowledged

Contains "resolve"

resolved

Contains "close"

closed

Custom severity or status values that don't match these patterns will not normalize and may not appear correctly in filtered views.

Metrics Powered by Rootly

Once connected, Rootly incident data feeds the following Span DORA reliability metrics:

Metric

Description

Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)

Average time from incident creation to resolution (resolved_at − created_at), shown as P50/P75/P90/Max

Mean Time to Detection (MTTD)

Average time from creation to acknowledgment (acknowledged_at − created_at)

Incident Frequency

Count of incidents over a given period, filterable by severity and team

Change Failure Rate

Ratio of deployments that result in incidents

These metrics are available in Span's Reliability dashboards and can be filtered by team, time range, and severity.

Sync Schedule & Data Freshness

Span syncs Rootly data automatically every ~2 hours using an incremental sync, so only new or updated incidents are fetched on each run. User data is fully refreshed on every sync cycle.

What this means for you:

  • New incidents and status changes appear in Span within approximately 2 hours of occurring in Rootly.

  • For the most up-to-date incident status during active incidents, check Rootly directly.

  • Span will flag a data freshness warning if no sync has completed within 6 hours. If you see this, check that your API key is still valid.

Disconnecting Rootly

  1. Go to Organization Settings → Integrations → Rootly.

  2. Click Disconnect.

  3. Confirm the disconnection. Historical incident data already synced to Span will be retained, but no new data will be fetched.

Troubleshooting

"Invalid API Key" on connect

  • Verify you copied the full key without extra whitespace.

  • Confirm the key has read access to incidents and teams in Rootly.

  • Try regenerating a new key in Rootly and using that instead.

No incidents appearing in Span

  • Wait up to 2 hours for the first sync to complete after connecting.

  • Check that your Rootly account actually contains incidents.

  • If you only see incidents for some teams, verify your team mappings are configured correctly.

Incidents not associated with a team

  • Make sure the relevant Rootly teams are mapped to Span teams in the Team Mappings section.

Duplicate or conflicting team mappings

  • Each Rootly team can only be mapped to one Span team. Remove any duplicate mappings and save again.

Data freshness warning in Span

  • Check that your Rootly API key hasn't been revoked or rotated.

  • Verify Rootly is reachable and not experiencing an outage.

  • Contact support@span.app if the warning persists after re-validating credentials.

Need Help?

Contact Span Support at support@span.app or reach out to your Customer Success Manager.