Responder Cheatsheet

The commands, emoji, and shortcuts a responder needs mid-incident, on one scannable page. For when you have been paged and do not have time to read.

You have been paged. This page is everything you need to act, and nothing else. For the fuller walkthrough, read the Responder Checklist before your next on-call rotation rather than during it.

Rootly is configured per organization. Commands can be renamed and emoji reassigned, so a few of these may differ for your team. /rootly help lists what is actually wired up in your workspace.

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First Sixty Seconds

🌐 works in any channel. 🚨 only works inside an incident channel. Running a 🚨 command elsewhere is the most common reason a command appears to do nothing.

You need to	Command	Where
Declare an incident	/rootly new	🌐
See what is already open	/rootly list	🌐
Catch up on an incident in progress	/rootly catchup	🚨
Open the incident control center	/rootly overview	🚨

/rootly catchup is the one to remember. Joining an incident that has been running for an hour, it summarizes what has happened so you do not have to scroll.

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Getting Help In

You need to	Command	Where
Page someone	/rootly page	🌐
Same thing, other names	/rootly escalate, /rootly call	🌐
Assign or change a role	/rootly assign	🚨
Attach a team	/rootly add team	🚨

All three paging words do the same thing. Inside an incident channel, the page is attached to the incident and routed through your external provider if one is configured; in any other channel, it opens the manual paging dialog.

If your organization has built its own paging workflow, these may behave differently — check Slack Commands for what is wired up in your workspace.

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Recording What Is Happening

You need to	Command	Where
Add a timeline event	/rootly timeline	🚨
Write or update the summary	/rootly summary	🚨
Change severity, type, or other fields	/rootly update	🚨
Tag an impacted service	/rootly add service	🚨
Create a task for now	/rootly task	🚨
Create a follow-up for later	/rootly followup	🚨
See what is assigned to you	/rootly todo	🚨

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Emoji Shortcuts

React to any message to capture it without leaving the conversation. These are the defaults:

Emoji	What it does
📌 💾	Adds the message to the incident timeline
📝	Creates a follow-up action item
⭐	Creates a task

📌 is the highest-value habit on this page. Pinning as you go builds the retrospective while the context is still fresh — you can prune later, but you cannot recover a moment nobody flagged.

Each of the three uses a separate emoji list and they cannot overlap. Your organization may have configured different emoji; check Integrations → Slack, or ask whoever set it up.

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Closing Out

You need to	Command
Mark mitigated	/rootly mitigate
Mark resolved	/rootly resolve
Change to any other status	/rootly status

Mitigated and resolved are different, and the difference shows up in your metrics. Mitigate when customer impact stops; resolve when the underlying problem is actually fixed.

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Where Things Live

What you are looking for	Where
Every Slack command	Slack integration reference
The full responder walkthrough	Responder Checklist
Your role and what it expects	Incident Roles
Timeline options beyond emoji	Adding Events via Slack
Action items and follow-ups	Action Items via Slack
Paging and escalation behavior	Escalation Policies

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If Something Does Not Work

A command does nothing

Run /rootly connect to link your Slack account to Rootly. Most commands need it, and a fresh Slack account will not have it.

An emoji reaction didn't capture the message

Your organization may use different emoji than the defaults above, or emoji ingestion may be off. Use the command that matches what you were trying to capture — each emoji has its own, and they are not interchangeable:

Reaction that failed	Run instead
📌 💾	/rootly timeline
📝	/rootly followup
⭐	/rootly task

Then check the configuration — Integrations → Slack — so the reaction works next time.

You're in the wrong channel

Some commands only work in an incident channel. If you are in a normal channel and need to make it an incident, /rootly convert turns the channel into one.