Grafana OnCall
Grafana OnCall is an open-source incident response and on-call management system with a REST API for managing schedules, escalation chains, alert groups, integrations, and on-call rotations, available as self-hosted or Grafana Cloud managed.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
Token-based auth with no scopes. Self-hosted deployments inherit security posture from the operator. AGPL-3.0 license allows full source audit. TLS enforced on Grafana Cloud.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
Your team already uses Grafana for observability and wants a tightly integrated, open-source on-call scheduling and escalation system with full API control over rotations and alert routing.
Avoid When
You need a polished out-of-the-box on-call experience with mobile apps, status pages, and rich third-party integrations without managing your own deployment.
Use Cases
- • Querying the current on-call engineer for a given schedule to route an incident to the right person automatically
- • Creating or acknowledging alert groups programmatically when an automated system detects a critical condition
- • Managing escalation policy configurations as code during team structure changes or runbook updates
- • Pulling historical incident data (alert groups, resolution times) to feed an SRE metrics reporting agent
- • Creating integrations with custom webhook sources so non-native monitoring tools can route alerts through OnCall
Not For
- • Full incident management with post-mortem tracking — use PagerDuty or FireHydrant for richer incident lifecycle management
- • Service catalog or reliability scoring — OnCall focuses on alerting and scheduling, not service metadata
- • Organizations without an existing Grafana observability stack, where a standalone solution like PagerDuty is simpler
Interface
Authentication
API requests use an API token passed in the Authorization header as 'Token <token>'. Tokens are created per-organization in the OnCall UI. No OAuth or fine-grained scopes. Self-hosted deployments also support Grafana service account tokens.
Pricing
Open-source under AGPL-3.0. Grafana Cloud managed version is included in Grafana Cloud plans. Self-hosted requires Docker/Kubernetes deployment.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ Resource IDs (schedule ID, escalation chain ID, team ID) are opaque strings that must be discovered via list endpoints before use
- ⚠ On-call schedule resolution requires iterating shifts and overrides — the 'current on-call' endpoint simplifies this but is easy to miss
- ⚠ The API behaves differently between self-hosted and Grafana Cloud deployments; base URL and token format differ
- ⚠ Alert group states (firing, acknowledged, resolved, silenced) have specific valid state transitions — invalid transitions return non-obvious errors
- ⚠ Integration token (used by monitoring sources to send alerts) is separate from the API token used to manage OnCall resources
Alternatives
Full Evaluation Report
Detailed scoring breakdown, competitive positioning, security analysis, and improvement recommendations for Grafana OnCall.
Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.