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Overview

Motion’s AI-powered task and calendar app handles task prioritization, scheduling, and time-blocking for the people on your team who plan their day in it. Wire it into Rootly and incident follow-ups land in Motion automatically — pre-mapped severity to priority, pre-populated title and description from incident context, ready to be scheduled into a responder’s day without anyone re-typing what happened. The integration goes both directions: Rootly creates and updates Motion tasks as incidents and action items progress, and the Motion task URL is linked back on the Rootly side so responders can jump between the two with one click.

Auto-Create Tasks

Every new incident and action item can spawn a corresponding Motion task with title, description, project, and labels populated from Rootly context.

Severity → Priority

Critical incidents map to Motion’s ASAP priority, High to HIGH, Medium to MEDIUM, Low to LOW — so the on-call’s Motion view sorts the right thing first.

Bidirectional Links

The Motion task URL is stored on the incident or action item, and the Rootly link is on the Motion task — one click between systems either way.

Liquid Templating

Customize task titles and descriptions with Liquid expressions referencing incident fields, severity, environments, and custom fields.

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Before You Begin

You’ll need access to both sides of the connection.
  • In Motion — a user account with permission to generate API keys and at least one workspace and project available.
  • In Rootly — an admin role so you can reach Configuration → Integrations and complete the Motion setup.
Motion’s API access requires a paid plan. If you’re evaluating Motion for the first time, Motion’s developer docs walk through the basics before you reach the API key step.
Rootly recommends generating the Motion API key from a dedicated service account rather than a personal user. The integration is keyed to one user’s API key and only sees the workspaces and projects that user can access — using a personal account creates an avoidable outage if that user loses access or leaves the organization.

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Generate Your Motion API Key

The vendor-side setup is a single key. Refer to Motion’s API getting-started guide for the latest UI specifics; the high-level flow is below.
1

Open Motion Settings

Sign into Motion and navigate to Settings → API.
2

Create An API Key

Click Create API Key, give it a descriptive name (rootly-production works), and click Generate.
Motion shows the API key value once. Copy it now and store it in your secrets manager — you cannot retrieve it later, only revoke and reissue.
3

Confirm Workspace And Project Access

Confirm the user that owns the API key has at least one workspace and one project visible. Rootly’s setup uses those as the dropdown options for task destination — without them, the integration save will succeed but task creation will have nowhere to land.

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Connect Motion to Rootly

With the API key in hand, the Rootly-side setup is a single field and a save.
1

Open Motion Settings In Rootly

In Rootly, go to Configuration → Integrations and locate Motion. Click Setup.
2

Paste The API Key

Paste your Motion API key into the API Key field. Rootly validates the key against Motion’s v1/workspaces endpoint immediately — a successful save means the key authenticates and at least one workspace is reachable.
3

Review The Auto-Created Workflows

Rootly creates four default workflows the moment the integration connects:
  • Create Motion Task when an incident is created
  • Update Motion Task when an incident updates
  • Create Motion Task when an action item is created
  • Update Motion Task when an action item updates
Open Workflows in Rootly to see them. They’re disabled by default — enable the ones you want, and configure each with the target workspace, project, and status for your team.

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Auto-Created Workflows

The four workflows give you incident and action-item lifecycle coverage out of the box. Each can be customized — change the trigger conditions, modify the Liquid templates, or duplicate them for different teams or services.

Create On Incident

Fires when an incident is created. Pushes a Motion task with the incident title, summary, severity-mapped priority, and a link back to Rootly.

Update On Incident

Fires when an incident updates. Syncs the latest status, priority, and labels back to the linked Motion task.

Create On Action Item

Fires when a Rootly action item is created. Pushes the action item as a Motion task for the responder who owns the follow-up.

Update On Action Item

Fires when an action item changes — status, owner, due date. Keeps the linked Motion task in sync.

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Configuration Reference

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string
required
Motion personal or workspace API key. Stored encrypted at rest. Rotate by revoking the key in Motion’s Settings → API panel and pasting a new value here.
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dropdown
required
Motion workspace where Rootly creates tasks. Fetched live from Motion when you configure a workflow action. Each workflow can target a different workspace if your team uses several.
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dropdown
required
Motion project inside the chosen workspace. Cascading dropdown — the project list updates when the workspace selection changes.
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dropdown
Initial status the Motion task is created with. Pulled from the chosen project’s status configuration. Defaults to the project’s “todo”-equivalent if not set.
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enum
Initial priority of the Motion task. Defaults to a severity-based mapping (see Field Mapping below), but you can hardcode a priority per workflow if you want every task at the same level.
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Liquid
Title shown on the Motion task. Default uses the incident or action item title. Override with Liquid expressions like [{{ incident.severity }}] {{ incident.title }} to bake severity into the title.
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Liquid
Description body on the Motion task. Default includes the incident summary plus a link back to Rootly. Customize with any incident field, custom field, or environment metadata.
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array
Optional Motion labels to apply. Maps from Rootly environments by default — incidents tagged with the production environment become Motion tasks labeled production.

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Field Mapping

Rootly maps the most useful incident metadata to Motion’s task fields out of the box. All of these can be overridden per workflow.

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Test the Integration

After saving the API key and enabling at least one workflow, verify end-to-end task creation.
1

Create A Test Incident

Trigger a test incident from Rootly’s web UI, Slack, or API. Pick a severity that matches one of your workflow’s trigger conditions.
2

Confirm The Motion Task Appeared

Open your Motion workspace. A new task should appear in the configured project within a few seconds, with the incident title, severity-mapped priority, and a link back to Rootly in the description.
3

Verify The Reverse Link

Back in Rootly, open the test incident. The Motion task URL should be visible in the Integrations section on the incident. Clicking it opens the task in Motion.
A Motion task created from a Rootly incident plus the reverse link visible on the Rootly side confirms both the create and the link-back paths are wired correctly. Now expand the workflow rollout to your real incident severities.

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Troubleshooting

The API key is invalid, expired, or copied with surrounding whitespace. Verify:
  • The key value matches exactly what Motion displayed when you created it
  • The key wasn’t revoked or rotated in Motion’s Settings → API panel
  • The Motion account is on a plan that includes API access
Most common causes:
  • The workspace or project configured on the workflow no longer exists in Motion — re-open the workflow and confirm both dropdowns still resolve
  • The status configured on the workflow was deleted in Motion’s project configuration
  • The Motion API quota for your plan has been exhausted — Motion returns 429 errors that Rootly logs but doesn’t surface visibly
The workflow has a hardcoded priority overriding the severity mapping. Open the workflow’s Motion action and either remove the priority override (to fall back to severity mapping) or set the hardcoded priority you want.
The Update Motion Task workflow either isn’t enabled or doesn’t match the same trigger conditions as the Create workflow. Open both workflows and confirm the trigger conditions align — typically the Update workflow’s trigger should be “Incident updates” with a condition matching the Create workflow’s filters.
The link is stored in incident.motion_task_url when the Create workflow succeeds. If it’s missing, either the workflow didn’t run (check Workflow Runs) or the workflow encountered an error before completing the create step. Check the run history for the specific incident.
Revoke the existing key in Motion’s Settings → API panel, create a new one with the same scope, and paste the new value into Rootly’s Motion settings. The previous key continues working in Rootly until the new value is saved, then it’s immediately replaced.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Duplicate the Create Motion Task workflow and set different trigger conditions plus different workspace/project targets on each copy. For example, production-environment incidents into a Production project, staging incidents into a Staging project.
Not currently. Rootly is the source of truth for incident and action-item lifecycle; Motion mirrors what Rootly sends. The Motion task URL stays accessible on the Rootly side, so responders can update Motion directly without affecting Rootly state.
Yes. Each ticketing integration runs its own workflows independently. Many teams push to Jira for engineering tracking and Motion for the responder’s personal scheduling, in parallel.
Yes. Edit the auto-created Create workflow’s trigger conditions to filter by severity, environment, custom field, or any other Rootly condition. Only matching incidents will spawn Motion tasks.
Workflow runs that hit a Motion API error are retried by Rootly’s job queue. If Motion is unavailable for an extended outage, runs eventually fail and surface in the workflow run history — they can be re-run manually once Motion recovers.

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Next Steps

Workflows

Customize the auto-created workflows, add filters, chain follow-up actions, or build new Motion automations from scratch.

Action Items

Configure how Rootly tracks post-incident work that pushes to Motion as tasks.

Severities

Adjust the severity definitions Rootly uses for the severity-to-priority mapping.

Custom Fields

Add custom fields whose values can flow into Motion task descriptions via Liquid templating.