Grafana OnCall — Open Source Incident Response and On-Call Management

What it is

Grafana OnCall is an open-source incident response and on-call management tool. It integrates natively with Grafana alerting to route alerts to the right person at the right time. Features include on-call schedules, escalation chains, multi-channel notifications (Slack, PagerDuty, phone, SMS), and team rotation management.

Grafana OnCall targets DevOps and SRE teams already using Grafana for monitoring who want on-call management without paying for PagerDuty or Opsgenie.

How it saves time or tokens

Grafana OnCall eliminates the gap between monitoring and incident response. Alerts from Grafana flow directly into OnCall without webhook configuration. Escalation chains ensure that if the primary on-call does not acknowledge, the alert automatically routes to the next person.

Schedule management with overrides and swaps handles the messy reality of PTO and shift changes without manual coordination.

How to use

1. Enable the OnCall plugin in your Grafana instance
2. Create on-call schedules with team rotations
3. Define escalation chains: who gets notified first, second, and third
4. Connect notification channels (Slack, email, phone)

Example

# Terraform configuration for Grafana OnCall
resource 'grafana_oncall_schedule' 'primary' {
  name      = 'Primary On-Call'
  type      = 'calendar'
  time_zone = 'America/New_York'
}

resource 'grafana_oncall_escalation_chain' 'critical' {
  name = 'Critical Alerts'
}

resource 'grafana_oncall_escalation' 'step1' {
  escalation_chain_id = grafana_oncall_escalation_chain.critical.id
  type                = 'notify_on_call_from_schedule'
  notify_on_call_from_schedule = grafana_oncall_schedule.primary.id
  position            = 0
}

resource 'grafana_oncall_escalation' 'step2' {
  escalation_chain_id = grafana_oncall_escalation_chain.critical.id
  type                = 'wait'
  duration            = 300  # 5 minutes
  position            = 1
}

Related on TokRepo

• Monitoring tools -- Monitoring and alerting tools
• DevOps tools -- Infrastructure and operations

Common pitfalls

• OnCall requires Grafana 9.0+ and the OnCall plugin; older Grafana versions are not supported
• Phone and SMS notifications require a Twilio or Grafana Cloud connection; self-hosted setups default to Slack and email
• Escalation chains without a final catch-all step can result in unacknowledged alerts during off-hours