How to Monitor Rootly with Vigilmon

Rootly is the Slack-native incident management platform that engineering teams rely on to declare incidents, coordinate responders, assign roles, run task checklists, update status pages, and generate AI-powered retrospectives — all without leaving Slack. When Rootly's API is degraded, incident commanders lose the ability to trigger workflows, automated role assignments stop firing, and status page updates stall while customers wait for communication. Vigilmon gives you external visibility into Rootly's availability: the API health endpoint, webhook receiver, status page, and SSL certificate expiry, so your incident management platform is never silently broken when you need it most.

What You'll Build

• An HTTP monitor on Rootly's API health endpoint to detect service degradation
• A webhook endpoint monitor to confirm Rootly can receive external alerts and triggers
• A status page availability check to catch customer-facing outages
• SSL certificate monitoring for your Rootly subdomain
• An alerting setup that separates API failures from integration-layer failures

Prerequisites

• A Rootly account with API access (starter or enterprise plan)
• Your Rootly subdomain (e.g., yourorg.rootly.com) or a self-hosted deployment
• Rootly API token from Settings → API Keys
• A free account at vigilmon.online

Step 1: Understand Rootly's Health Endpoints

Rootly exposes a health check endpoint at its API base. For cloud-hosted accounts this is reachable at your organization's subdomain:

curl https://api.rootly.com/v1/ping
# Returns: {"data":{"id":"pong"}} on a healthy system

For enterprise self-hosted Rootly deployments, the health check path is typically:

curl https://rootly.yourcompany.com/api/health
# Returns HTTP 200 with {"status":"ok"}

A non-200 response or connection timeout means Rootly's backend is unreachable, and incident workflows will not trigger from Slack commands or incoming webhooks.

Step 2: Create a Vigilmon HTTP Monitor for the API Health Endpoint

1. Log in to Vigilmon → Add Monitor → HTTP.
2. URL: https://api.rootly.com/v1/ping (or your self-hosted health path).
3. Check interval: 60 seconds.
4. Response timeout: 15 seconds.
5. Expected status: 200.
6. Keyword: pong (present in a healthy response from Rootly's cloud API).
7. Label: Rootly API health.
8. Click Save.

This monitor catches:

• Rootly cloud API outages and maintenance windows
• Network routing failures between your infrastructure and Rootly
• Self-hosted Rootly crashes, OOM kills, or pod restarts in Kubernetes
• Database connection failures that cause the Rails API to return 503
• Deployment failures after Rootly version upgrades

Alert sensitivity: Set to trigger after 1 consecutive failure. When Rootly's API is down, Slack commands like /rootly declare fail silently, and on-call engineers cannot open incidents through the normal workflow.

Step 3: Monitor the Rootly Webhook Endpoint

Rootly receives webhooks from PagerDuty, Jira, GitHub, and other tools to auto-create incidents and trigger runbooks. If the webhook endpoint is down, these integrations stop delivering events silently — alerts fire in PagerDuty but Rootly never creates an incident:

# Check that the webhook receiver responds (adjust to your configured endpoint)
curl -I https://api.rootly.com/v1/webhooks
# Expect 401 (auth required) or 200 — both confirm the endpoint is listening

1. Add Monitor → HTTP.
2. URL: https://api.rootly.com/v1/webhooks (or your Rootly org's inbound webhook URL from Settings → Webhooks).
3. Check interval: 2 minutes.
4. Response timeout: 10 seconds.
5. Expected status: 200 or 401 (either confirms the endpoint is accepting connections).
6. Label: Rootly webhook receiver.
7. Click Save.

Monitoring for 401 as a valid response is intentional here. An authentication error means the server is running and rejecting unauthenticated requests — which is correct behavior. A connection error or 502/503 means the endpoint itself is down.

Step 4: Monitor Rootly's Status Page

If your organization uses Rootly to publish a customer-facing status page, its availability is a product guarantee. Monitor it separately from the API:

curl https://status.yourorg.com
# Returns HTML with status page content

1. Add Monitor → HTTP.
2. URL: https://status.yourorg.com (your Rootly-powered status page URL).
3. Check interval: 2 minutes.
4. Response timeout: 15 seconds.
5. Expected status: 200.
6. Keyword: Operational or your organization name (appears in the status page HTML).
7. Label: Rootly status page.
8. Click Save.

When the status page monitor fires independently of the API health monitor, the issue is typically in the CDN or static hosting layer for the status page — not in the Rootly API backend itself. This distinction helps you avoid sending engineers to investigate the wrong layer.

Step 5: Monitor SSL Certificates

Rootly uses HTTPS for all API calls and webhook delivery. An expired certificate breaks every integration:

openssl s_client -connect api.rootly.com:443 2>/dev/null | openssl x509 -noout -dates

1. Add Monitor → SSL Certificate.
2. Domain: api.rootly.com (or your self-hosted Rootly domain).
3. Alert when expiry is within: 30 days.
4. Alert again: 14 days, 7 days, 3 days.
5. Click Save.

Add a second SSL monitor for your status page domain if it uses a custom certificate:

1. Domain: status.yourorg.com.
2. Same thresholds as above.
3. Label: Rootly status page SSL.

Step 6: Monitor the Slack App Integration Health

Rootly's core value is its Slack integration. While you cannot directly HTTP-monitor Slack's delivery of messages to Rootly, you can monitor the OAuth callback endpoint that Rootly uses to validate Slack connections:

curl https://app.rootly.com/auth/slack/callback
# Returns redirect or HTML — confirms the auth layer is responding

1. Add Monitor → HTTP.
2. URL: https://app.rootly.com.
3. Check interval: 5 minutes.
4. Expected status: 200.
5. Keyword: Rootly (appears in the web application HTML).
6. Label: Rootly web app.
7. Click Save.

Step 7: Configure Alerting

In Vigilmon under Settings → Notifications, configure your alert channels:

| Monitor | Trigger | Runbook action | |---|---|---| | API health | Non-200 or keyword missing | Check Rootly status page; notify incident management team; use manual Slack coordination | | Webhook receiver | Connection error or 5xx | Check Rootly webhook logs; manually acknowledge PagerDuty alerts; verify ingress rules | | Status page | Non-200 or keyword missing | Check CDN configuration; contact Rootly support if self-hosted CDN | | SSL certificate | < 30 days to expiry | Renew certificate; verify cert-manager or Let's Encrypt renewal pipeline | | Web app | Non-200 or keyword missing | Rootly frontend issue; check for deployment in progress |

Alert after: 1 consecutive failure for API health and webhook monitors. 2 consecutive failures for status page and web app monitors.

Notification channels: Route API health and webhook alerts to your primary on-call channel. If Rootly itself is down, ensure you have a fallback communication path (e.g., direct Slack channel, PagerDuty SMS) since Rootly-managed incident channels may not be available.

Common Rootly Failure Modes and What Vigilmon Catches

| Scenario | Vigilmon monitor | |---|---| | Rootly cloud API outage | API health monitor fires; all Slack incident commands fail | | Webhook receiver down | Webhook monitor fires; PagerDuty/GitHub integrations stop creating incidents | | Status page CDN failure | Status page monitor fires; customers cannot view incident updates | | SSL certificate expired | SSL monitor fires; all API calls and webhook deliveries fail with TLS errors | | Self-hosted DB connection lost | API health returns 503; all incident operations blocked | | Deployment failure during upgrade | API health monitor fires; temporary during rollback | | Rootly web app frontend broken | Web app monitor fires; API health stays green | | DNS misconfiguration | All monitors fire simultaneously |

Rootly is your incident management nerve center — when it fails, the response process breaks down exactly when engineering teams need it most. Vigilmon gives you external visibility into Rootly's API, webhook receiver, status page, and SSL certificates, so you know the moment your incident platform is compromised and can fall back to manual coordination procedures before the next critical incident.

Start monitoring Rootly in under 5 minutes — register free at vigilmon.online.