Grafana OnCall

Grafana OnCall is an open-source incident response and on-call management platform developed by Grafana Labs, designed to route alerts from Prometheus, Grafana Loki, and Grafana Tempo to the engineers responsible for responding to them. It provides on-call scheduling, escalation chains, and incident collaboration tools, positioning itself as an open-source alternative to commercial platforms like PagerDuty and Opsgenie. OnCall integrates tightly with the Grafana ecosystem, allowing alerts triggered in Grafana dashboards to flow directly into on-call rotations without requiring separate configuration. This integration reduces operational friction but also reinforces the vendor coupling that characterizes the broader Grafana stack: the more components of the stack an organization adopts, the more difficult it becomes to replace any single component.

The proliferation of specialized incident response tools reveals a deeper pathology: organizations are investing more in routing alerts than in making alerts worth routing.