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Routing incoming alerts ensures that the appropriate responders are paged to begin investigating any potential issues and events from your monitoring tools. Rootly has two ways to route alerts to a team, service, or escalation policy:
  1. Directly in your monitoring tools: Follow the instructions on your Alert Source to learn how to route through your monitoring tool.
  2. In Rootly with Alert Routes.
This guide will help you configure your routing logic inside of Rootly using Alert Routes. Clean Shot2025 10 14at11 09 36@2x Pn

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Create an Alert Route

Create an Alert Route by navigating to Alerts > Routes and select New Route. Give your Alert Route the following details:
  1. A descriptive name.
  2. The Alert Sources that this Alert Route will route alerts from: check out our Integration documentation to see how to connect your monitoring tools with Rootly’s Alert Source integrations.
    1. You’ll be able to add and remove Alert Sources later if you wish.
  3. An owning team: the admin of the owning team(s) will be granted edit access to the Alert Route.
Note: Team Admins are only able to create Alert Routes assigned to their team. They will also only be able to route alerts from Alert Sources owned by their team.
Click Add Route to begin configuring the Alert Route.

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Configuring Routing Rules

Now that your Alert Route has been created, you can begin adding your Routing Rules: Rootly uses these rules to know who should get paged off an incoming alert. Start adding a Routing Rule by clicking Add routing rule and give your Alert Route a descriptive name. Clean Shot2025 10 14at11 49 35@2x Pn

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Routing Rule Conditions

Next, begin adding conditions to describe the types of Alerts that should get routed through this rule. When an Alert comes in from the Alert Route’s selected Sources, Rootly will evaluate if it should route the alert based on the rule’s conditions.
  1. Select the Field you’d like to use to evaluate this Route. Conditions can be defined using any Alert Fields, as well as referring to the Alert’s payload directly.
    We recommend using Alert Fields as much as possible, because your Alert’s payload structure may change. If you do want to use the Alert’s payload, click into the alerts on the right-hand side to see their payloads, and select the field values to prefill the JSONPath for that field.
  2. Choose the Operator and Value for your condition.
    For more dynamic conditions, you can evaluate Fields and Values using regex using the ‘matches regex’ operator.
  3. Continue adding new conditions or condition groups to define the Routing Rule’s conditions.
Clean Shot2025 10 14at11 55 38@2x Pn To help you validate your logic, you’ll see all past Alerts that match the conditions you’ve built in the right-hand side. Clean Shot2025 10 15at09 38 17@2x Pn

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Routing Rule Destinations

To finish your Alert Route, determine where the alert should be routed to. Alerts in Rootly can be routed to a team, service, or escalation policy. When an alert is routed to a team or service, it will trigger that team or service’s respective escalation policy.
We recommend routing to a team or service rather than directly to an Escalation Policy for easier measurement of your team’s on-call performances.
You can add many destinations to a Routing Rule. If an Alert matches this rule, Rootly will page all destinations set in the rule. Once you’re done setting the conditions and destination, save your Routing Rule!

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Complete your Alert Route

Your Alert Route can contain as many Rules as you’d like. Read below to learn how Rootly evaluates each Alert Route and Rule.

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Routing alerts

When an Alert from your monitoring tools is sent to Rootly, we do the following:
  1. If the payload contains a target ID (i.e. a team or service’s ID), we route it automatically to that target ID. If the payload does not contain a target ID…
  2. We begin evaluating the Alert Routes you’ve configured in Rootly.

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Evaluating Alert Routes

Rootly will begin evaluating each Alert Route that refers to that Alert Source, assuming that there is no target ID in the alert’s payload. If your Alert Source is used in many Alert Routes, we will evaluate all Alert Routes that match that Alert Source. This means that we may page many destinations across the Alert Routes. Once we find an Alert Route that uses the Alert Source, we begin evaluating the Rules in that Route.
If an Alert doesn’t match any Alert Routes, we consider this a ‘Non-Paging Alert’. Non-Paging Alerts do not page anyone. You can review these on the Alerts page in your Rootly dashboard by filtering by Status to make sure your Alert Routes are configured correctly.

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Evaluating Routing Rules

Rootly evaluates your Alert Route’s Rules from the top to the bottom: you can control the over of the Rules by selecting ”…”, then Reorder rule to set the rule’s preferred spot. Clean Shot2025 10 15at09 47 55@2x Pn Once Rootly matches an Alert to a Rule, we stop evaluating any other Rules in the Route and page the matching Rule’s destination. **Note: **We will continue evaluating any other Alert Routes that use the Alert’s Alert Source.
We recommend ordering the rules from most specific to most generic.

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Alert timeline

The Alert’s timeline will include an event indicating which Alert Route the Alert was routed through. Clean Shot2025 04 14at15 57 27@2x Pn