Grafana OnCall is an open source, easy-to-use on-call management tool built to help teams improve their collaboration and resolve incidents faster. Grafana OnCall (formerly known as Amixr) was started in 2018 at Amixr Inc., which Grafana Labs acquired in 2021.
$0
PagerDuty
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD) provides digital operations management. Serving organizations of all sizes, PagerDuty aims to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers, every time.
Setting up the Grafana OnCall configuration is from the UI is a little bit complex, you need to create an integration, from there an escalation chain ann after that you need to change the template for the notificaion. Also the documentation is not entirely clear, particularly the section on provisioning with Terraform, because production stack is provisioned with infra structure as code.
It's the most effective when you need to alert someone specifically or a team. It sends notifications everywhere, like email, phone, and SMS, ensuring critical issues are never missed. The feature, like the event orchestrator, allows us to set logic-based rules that automatically suppress non-emergency alerts.
setting up the Grafana OnCall functionality is complex but if you setup this and you know how to setup then the rest is easy. IAC is provided with terraform The UI for the alert groups shows the alerts in one view and from there you can go to the relevant alert trigger to solve the problems.
The UI is more complex than I would like. Part of the challenge is that most users use PagerDuty infrequently; I don't remember how I changed a policy last time. Another part of the challenge is that some users expect alerting to be a trivial feature, and are reluctant to invest any time in reading the documentation.
PagerDuty is reliable and easy to set up. It gives an effective way to notify the team about critical incidents which results in a faster turnaround time on issues. users can customize their alerts rules based on their preferences. Overall it's effective and easy to use which adds great business value.
Unlike Grafana OnCall tool Splunk On-Call solution looks more complicated and noticeably inferior in the visualization of the information presented (UI is not user friendly). Alerts re-route process looks totally illogical and you need some time to get with it. However Splunk On-Call looks more featurable out-of-box and has iOS and Android apps while Grafana OnCall provides a general dashboard apps only.
I have not use the 2 technologies for as long as I have used PagerDuty but in my opinion PagerDuty makes things a lot easier. The other tools got the job done and got alerts out but PagerDuty just seemed to make the setup for on-call alert schedules and integrations easier than the others. This isn't to say the others are difficult, just that PagerDuty was slightly better. I also have noticed that more tools have options to integrate to PagerDuty over the other tools.