Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Many organizations use incident response setups that enable them to page on-call personnel via calling or sending a message to a phone number. In this guide, you will learn how to configure such a system by using Grafana OnCall. For practical purposes, we’ll pair it with Twilio, though the same basic workflow should be applicable to other platforms. We will start with a basic setup that uses a phone number in Twilio to both call and send SMS messages to a webhook integration in Grafana OnCall.

Murphy's Law says that "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong," drawing attention to the inevitabilities of life laced with irony. In IT monitoring, we can tweak it and say, "The most important monitoring alert will always trigger when you're on vacation with spotty internet." Given life's uncertainties, how can IT engineers stay prepared at all times? Especially when we know that all it takes is just one person staying alert and available when things go wrong in IT to tide over outages.

Every moment counts when you’re managing incidents that can affect your services and customers. That’s why we’re excited to introduce a new bi-directional integration between Grafana OnCall and ServiceNow, a popular platform many large organizations rely on to help manage their incidents.

Yet, how your enterprise builds and manages its oncall schedule can impact departments and stakeholders across your organization. When it comes to oncall scheduling, your enterprise must plan as much as possible. Fortunately, with the right processes and tools, you can effectively implement and manage an oncall schedule. You can also use this schedule to quickly identify and resolve incidents and prevent them from causing long-lasting damage to your organization and its stakeholders.

One important consideration when adopting a tool is whether it can integrate with your existing workflows and services. Each scenario can be highly specific, which is why it’s important to look for tools that have a public API or customizable webhooks. Last year, Grafana OnCall expanded its webhook support to allow for more complex setups, offering greater flexibility to interact with other services during alert group events.

Your enterprise may have oncall management employees available across various departments, and these workers can help your business if problems arise, even outside of normal operating hours. How you manage your oncall management teams can have significant ramifications on your enterprise and its stakeholders. To understand why this is the case, let’s look at what it means to be “oncall,”. Along with tips and recommendations to help your enterprise staff achieve its desired results.

There’s no two ways about it: on-call is stressful. But with humans at the center, it’s especially important to find ways to make it as manageable and empathetic as possible. In this webinar with our friends at ELC, incident.io VP of Engineering, Noberto Lopes, and Intercom Staff Product Engineer, Andrej Blagojević, discuss their own experiences with on-call, and how the process can be better.