What is it?
A complete stack for detecting problems and responding effectively: unified alerting, SLOs, on-call management, incident coordination, and AI-assisted root cause analysis.
When you need it
| Scenario | What Alerting and IRM provides |
|---|---|
| You want to know when things break | Unified alerting across metrics, logs, traces |
| You need to define reliability targets | SLOs with error budgets |
| You need to manage on-call rotations | Schedules, escalations, integrations |
| You need to coordinate incident response | War rooms, timelines, post-mortems |
Questions answered
| With Alerting and IRM, you can answer… |
|---|
| How do I get notified when something breaks? |
| Are we meeting our reliability targets? |
| Who’s on-call right now and how do I reach them? |
| What happened during this incident and what was the root cause? |
Problems solved
| Problem | Solution |
|---|---|
| “We find out about outages from customers” | Proactive alerting detects issues first. |
| “Too many alerts, we ignore them” | SLOs focus alerts on what matters to users. |
| “Unclear who to call during incidents” | OnCall manages schedules and escalations. |
| “Root cause analysis takes hours” | Sift automates Kubernetes checks; Grafana Assistant Investigations analyzes across all signals. |
Script
Let’s start with Alerting and Incident Response Management. It’s probably the most immediately valuable operational capability.
Grafana Cloud provides a complete stack here. Unified alerting works across metrics, logs, and traces with one system for all your alert rules. SLOs let you define reliability targets with error budgets, so you know when you’re burning through your reliability faster than planned.
OnCall (that’s Grafana OnCall) manages on-call schedules, escalations, and notifications. Incident (that’s Grafana Incident) coordinates your response with war rooms, timelines, and post-mortems.
Sift runs automated Kubernetes investigations on your telemetry, surfacing relevant signals without requiring a prompt. And Grafana Assistant adds AI-powered analysis across all your signals — metrics, logs, traces, and profiles — suggesting probable causes through natural language.
This solves real problems. You find out about outages before customers tell you. Your team doesn’t drown in alert noise because SLOs focus on what actually matters.
When something breaks at 3 AM, OnCall knows exactly who to page and how to reach them.
And root cause analysis that used to take hours gets a head start from automated checks and AI.