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.

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Create an Alert Route

Create an Alert Route by navigating to Alerts > Routes and select New Route. An Alert Route includes the following information:
  1. A descriptive name.
  2. An owning team: the admin of the owning team(s) will be granted edit access to the Alert Route.
  3. An Alert Source: check out our Integration documentation to see how to connect your monitoring tools with Rootly’s Alert Source integrations.
  4. Conditions: when an Alert from the source in step 3 should be routed.
  5. Destination: where the accepted Alert should be routed.
Once you’ve configured all the details on your Alert Route, make sure to Save and enable the route to begin routing your Alerts.

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Setting team ownership

Use the Owning Team field to assign ownership over the Alert Route. The Owning Team’s Team Admin will be granted create, update, and delete permissions for 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.

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Conditions

Use Conditions to set rules for when an Alert from the Alert Source is eligible for being routed to the Destination. For example, if your organization is using a single webhook for your monitoring tool, add a Condition to only route an Alert to a specific Team if the payload indicates that Team’s product area is impacted. As you update your Conditions, the right-hand Alert Preview window will update to reflect the Alerts that fulfill the Condition criteria. If an Alert Route doesn’t have any conditions, all Alerts from the Alert Source are eligible to be routed by the Alert Route.
Quickly build your Conditions by using the right-hand Alert Preview window. Click into each Alert to see the payloads, and select the field values to prefill the JSONPath for that field.

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Destinations

When an Alert is routed to a team or service, that team or service’s escalation policy will be fired.
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.

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Routing alerts

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How alerts are routed in Rootly

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 evaluate all the routing rules associated with that Alert Source.
  3. We execute the first Alert Route rule that is true for the incoming Alert.
  4. If an Alert doesn’t match any Alert Routes, we consider this a ‘Non-Paging Alert’.
    1. 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.
Note: An Alert will only be routed through a single Alert Route. We evaluate the Routing rules from oldest to newest, and will route using the first rule that matches the Alert.

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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