For many engineering teams, an incident is a chaotic, all-hands-on-deck event. Once the incident is resolved, everyone returns to their regular work and the valuable lessons from the incident are often lost. The result is a cycle of repeated failures and engineer burnout, where incidents are something to be survived, not learned from.
At Cortex, our mission is to help engineering organizations build a culture of continuous improvement. That’s why we’re excited to announce our formal partnership with Rootly, the AI-native on-call and incident response platform trusted by teams at NVIDIA, LinkedIn, Replit, and hundreds more.
By combining Rootly’s best-in-class incident response workflow with Cortex’s real-time service intelligence, we’re empowering teams to break the cycle of repeat and prolonged incidents to build a culture of proactive improvement, turning every incident into an opportunity to build more resilient systems.
Solving incident chaos with service intelligence
Rootly orchestrates the entire incident lifecycle, from the first alert and Slack channel creation to coordination, communications, and retrospectives. Cortex acts as the single source of truth for service intelligence, bringing critical context directly into Rootly’s workflow, including:
Service ownership and on-call information
Dependencies and blast radius
Recent deploys and operational health
Runbooks, checklists, and best practices
Reliability and maturity standards via Scorecards
By combining Rootly’s incident workflows with Cortex’s rich catalog data, incident responders no longer have to hunt for who owns what or where the runbook lives during an incident. The context is already there, surfaced at the moment it’s needed, helping teams respond faster and more effectively.
Turning incident data into a continuous improvement engine
This partnership isn’t just about handling incidents faster. It’s about making sure every incident contributes to stronger systems and better practices over time.
With Cortex Scorecards, organizations can encode what “great” incident management looks like and measure services against those standards. Rootly provides the incident and response data, while Cortex turns that data into clear, actionable benchmarks.
For example, teams might define maturity levels like:
Bronze:
Service has clear ownership and on-call rotation
A basic runbook linked for critical services
Silver:
Incidents have timely Slack channel creation
MTTA/MTTR under a defined threshold for P1s
Post-incident reviews are completed within a set timeframe
Gold:
There is high adherence to runbooks during incidents
Action items from retrospectives are tracked and closed
There are no repeated incidents for the same root cause over a defined period
These Scorecards give developers and SREs a structured way to level up from “good enough” to “industry-leading” incident practices, with Rootly and Cortex providing the data and the guardrails.
Turning standards into reality with initiatives
Standards alone don’t change behavior. That’s where Cortex Initiatives come in. Using Rootly data as a foundation, leaders can create Initiatives in Cortex to drive improvements across the organization, such as:
“Reduce MTTR for P1 incidents by 30% this quarter”
“Ensure 100% of P1/P2 incidents have retrospectives completed within 5 business days”
“Require runbooks for all Tier 1 services by the end of the quarter”
Cortex automatically tracks progress against these goals and notifies the right owners, creating a "TPM in a box" for your reliability programs. This turns manual chasing into consistent, automated execution.
What this means for Cortex customers
If you’re already using Rootly, our formalized partnership means a deeper integration roadmap focused on incident readiness and reliability, joint best practices for designing incident Scorecards, and a tighter feedback loop between your incident operations and your engineering excellence programs.
If you’re new to either Cortex or Rootly, this partnership offers a clear path to build a modern, scalable incident management practice; one that doesn’t just react to outages, but uses them to systematically improve your systems and teams.
Get started
If you’d like to see how Cortex and Rootly work together to turn incident analysis into continuous improvement, we’d be happy to show you.
Schedule a demo and learn how Cortex and Rootly can help your organization streamline incident management and drive engineering excellence.
