When the next incident hits, your team should feel prepared. With Incident Roles, you can quickly and efficiently assign responsibilities to your team and define the hierarchy of command.
A swift response will help reduce the impact. By adding descriptions and tasks ahead of time, you can ensure your team knows exactly what to do.
Rootly comes with four roles we consider essential for effective incident response.
Commander
The individual responsible for the overall management of the incident from start to finish. Delegation of tasks across the response team and final decision-making authority.
Communications lead
The individual responsible for managing internal and external communications to stakeholders outside of the response team.
Executive Sponsor
The individual responsible for complex decision making, often used for high-severity or sensitive incidents.
Retrospective Owner
The individual responsible for driving the post-incident retrospective process to completion.
Go to Configuration > Roles.
Select + New Role.
Add a name, description, and a list of responsibilities for the role.
Example
Name: Commander
Description: The person who takes charge of the incident, assigns tasks, and has the deciding vote on proceeding.
Responsibilities:
Toggle “make this role optional” if it’s not required for every incident.
Switch to the Advanced settings tab to adjust the incident permission set and “allow multiple users” to be assigned this role.
Select Create Role to continue. Tasks can be added after a role has been created.
Go to Configuration > Roles.
Find the role you want to add tasks to in the table. Click the pencil icon on the left side to edit.
Switch to the Tasks tab to see existing tasks. Click + Add Task.
Add a name (required) and description. Set the Priority to low, medium, or high.
Click Add to save.
Example
Name (required): Declare and classify the severity of the incident in Rootly
Description: Review the incident alerts, customer reports, and system status to assign an incident severity.
Priority: High
Go to Configuration > Roles.
Find the role you want to edit in the table. Click the pencil icon on the left side to edit.
There are three tabs:
Basics
Tasks
Advanced
Once the desired edits are complete, click Update to save.
Go to Configuration > Roles.
Find the role you want to edit in the table. Click the trashcan icon on the left side to delete.
Deleting an incident role will also remove its associated data. This can’t be undone. Select Delete to delete the role and all associated data, or click Discard changes to keep the role.
For help, use the slash command /rootly help in Slack or email support@rootly.com.