Grafana releases OnCall open source project

Looking forward to trying this out. I&#x27;ve always felt that PagerDuty was absurdly expensive for the feature set they were offering. It costs something at least $250 per user for organization larger than 5 person - even if you&#x27;re not an engineer who is ever directly on call. At my previous company, IT had to regularly send surveys to employees to assess if they <i>really</i> needed to have a PagerDuty account. Alerts are a key information in an organization that runs software in production and you shouldn&#x27;t have to pay $250 &#x2F; month just to be able to have some visibility into it. I&#x27;m hoping Grafana OnCall is able to fully replace PagerDuty.

Hello HN!<p>Matvey Kukuy, ex-CEO of Amixr and a head of the OnCall project here. We&#x27;ve been working hard for a few months to make this OSS release happen. I believe it should make incident response features (on-call rotations, escalations, multi-channel notifications) and best practices more accessible to the wider audience of SRE and DevOps engineers.<p>Hope someone will be able to finally sleep well at night being sure that OnCall will handle escalations and will alert the right person :)<p>Please join our community on a GitHub! The whole Grafana OnCall team is help you and to make this thing better.

I love Grafana, don&#x27;t get me wrong, but I have the sensation they are now in that position where, companies that got a massive capital injection and, therefore, a massive increase of work power, release too much and too soon.<p>It doesn&#x27;t have anything to do, of course, with the fact that this morning we suddenly found that all our dashboards stopped working because we were upgraded to Grafana v9, for which there is not a stable release nor documentation for breaking changes.<p>Luckily they rolled back our account.

Here is the repo: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;grafana&#x2F;oncall" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;grafana&#x2F;oncall</a><p>AGPL 3.0

It&#x27;s surprising how seemingly difficult it is to build a good on-call scheduling system. Everything I tried so far (not naming the companies here) felt like the UX was the last thing on the developers&#x27; minds. Which is tolerable during business hours but really annoying at 2am.<p>Is there some hidden complexity or is it just a consequence of engineers building a product for other engineers? Also, any tips what worked for you?

A bit disappointed by the architecture -- it&#x27;s a Django stack with MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, and Celery -- for what is effectively AlertManager (a single golang binary) with a nicer web frontend + Grafana integration + etc.<p>I&#x27;m curious why&#x2F;if this architecture was chosen. I get that it started as a standalone product (Amixr), but in the current state it is hard to rationalize deploying this next to Grafana in my current containerless setting.

Congrats - this looks great, and definitely something I was wishing for during an incident earlier this week.<p>A minor note, if anyone from Grafana is around - a bunch of the links on the bottom of the announcement go to a 404.

Hey HN, Ildar here, one of the co-founders of Amixr and one of the software engineers behind Grafana OnCall. Finally we open-sourced the product I&#x27;m really excited about that. Please try it out and leave your feedback

Seems like a solid replacement for Alertmanager for those already using Grafana OSS. Anyone planning on using both OnCall and Alertmanager?

I think it would be great if it was easier to mix and match Grafana SaaS and self-hosted products.<p>For example, we need to run Loki ourselves, for security &#x2F; privacy reasons, but wouldn&#x27;t mind using hosted versions of Tempo, Prometheus and OnCall.<p>Right now it isn&#x27;t super-easy to link e.g. self-hosted loki search queries with SaaS-Prometheus.

I like what grafana labs does with grafana.<p>Im annoyed by their license choice.<p>But apparently when you are grafana everything looks like a dashboard UI?<p>Joke aside I will have a look but I didn&#x27;t like the screenshots before already. I like the dashboardy thing for dashboards but otherwise it&#x27;s not a really good UI system for everything else.

Production helm chart link on this page leads to 404: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grafana.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;grafana-cloud&#x2F;oncall&#x2F;open-source&#x2F;#production-environment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grafana.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;grafana-cloud&#x2F;oncall&#x2F;open-source&#x2F;#p...</a>

The title is missing critical info: What the hell is it?<p>Of course the article isn&#x27;t much better. It reads like a joke, the joke being that &quot;on-call management&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean anything.

It&#x27;s very nice to see Python and AGPL used for this.

What I really want is an Android app that keeps alerting until a page is ACKed or escalated.

Very cool. I love what the Grafana team is up to.

Looks very cool, will have to give this a shot.

I would give a huge marketing bullshit award for the following sentence:<p>&lt;&lt;We offered Grafana OnCall to users as a SaaS tool first for a few reasons. It’s a commonly shared belief that the more independent your on-call management system is, the better it will be for your entire operation. If something goes wrong, there will be a “designated survivor” outside of your infrastructure to help identify any issues. &gt;&gt;<p>They tried to ensure that you use their SaaS offering because they care more about your own good than yourself. So humanist...

Another similar tool I&#x27;ve used in the past is GoAlert.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goalert.me&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goalert.me&#x2F;</a>

glad to hear this got open sourced!<p>for someone at grafana; noticed a dead link in the post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grafana.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;oncall&#x2F;main&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grafana.com&#x2F;docs&#x2F;oncall&#x2F;main&#x2F;</a>

Unfortunate that it&#x27;s AGPL. But this is looks really great!