Grafana OnCall is a compelling free alternative for Opsgenie scheduling

For teams leaving Opsgenie, Grafana OnCall offers a free, open-source solution for scheduling and alerts. It's deeply integrated with the Grafana stack, but requires self-hosting or reliance on Grafana Cloud.

The Answer Up Front

Grafana OnCall is the logical choice for engineering teams already invested in the Grafana observability stack (Loki, Prometheus, etc.) or for any small team seeking a capable, free on-call scheduling tool. Its self-hosted option eliminates the per-user pricing that plagues the category. Teams requiring extensive non-technical user management, complex cross-departmental scheduling, or guaranteed enterprise-grade support should stick with paid incumbents like PagerDuty or Atlassian's Jira Service Management. For a devops team managing its own rota, Grafana OnCall provides 90% of the necessary functionality at 0% of the cost.

Methodology

This v0 review analyzes Grafana OnCall (version observed June 2026 via public documentation) as a potential replacement for Opsgenie, prompted by a community discussion on the r/devops subreddit. The source signal, a post titled "How do you handle on-call scheduling after the Opsgenie EOL?" from user rszme, highlighted user frustration with manual overrides and per-seat pricing models. This analysis is based entirely on Grafana Labs' publicly available documentation, feature lists, and pricing for Grafana Cloud. It does not include independent performance benchmarks, a hands-on test of complex rota configurations, or long-term workflow evaluation. The goal is to assess its fitness for a small team based on its stated capabilities. This review will be updated if independent testing reveals significant divergence from vendor claims.

What It Does

Grafana OnCall is an incident response management tool integrated into the wider Grafana platform. Its core function is to manage on-call schedules and automate alert escalations.

Scheduling and overrides

The primary job of any on-call tool is scheduling. Grafana OnCall supports creating team schedules with rotations (daily, weekly, custom) and provides a calendar interface for managing them. Crucially for the original poster's pain point, it allows for overrides. A team member can schedule time off, and another can take their place for a specific period without restructuring the entire rotation. This is standard functionality, but essential.

Alert grouping and escalations

OnCall acts as a central dispatcher for alerts. It integrates with monitoring systems (like Grafana, Prometheus, Alertmanager, but also Datadog, New Relic, etc.) to receive alerts. It can then group related alerts to reduce noise and route them according to predefined escalation steps. An escalation chain might first notify the on-call engineer via Slack, then after five minutes send a push notification, and finally make a phone call if the alert remains unacknowledged.

Notification channels

Users can be notified through a variety of channels. Standard options include Slack, Telegram, phone calls, and SMS. There is also a dedicated Grafana OnCall mobile app for iOS and Android for push notifications and incident management on the go. This multi-channel approach is critical for ensuring high-severity alerts are not missed.

What's Interesting / What's Not

The most interesting aspect of Grafana OnCall is its business model. By offering a capable on-call tool for free (both in Grafana Cloud's generous free tier and as open-source software), Grafana commoditizes a feature that competitors like PagerDuty use as a primary revenue driver. This is a classic ecosystem play. OnCall makes the entire Grafana stack stickier. If your metrics, logs, and on-call schedules all live in one place, the activation energy required to switch any single component becomes much higher.

The tight integration is a double-edged sword. For teams using Grafana for observability, having alerts automatically correlated with dashboards is a powerful, streamlined workflow. For teams not using Grafana, OnCall can still function as a standalone tool, but it loses much of its appeal. It becomes just another scheduler, competing in a crowded market.

What's not particularly novel are the features themselves. Rotations, escalations, and multi-channel notifications are table stakes for this category. The user interface is functional and engineer-focused, which is fine for its target audience but lacks the polish of more mature, expensive platforms. The primary trade-off is polish and enterprise-readiness for cost and ecosystem integration. Don't expect the same level of granular reporting or user permissioning found in a product that costs hundreds of dollars per seat.

Pricing

(Pricing snapshot from June 17, 2026)

• Self-Hosted: Free and open-source. Requires your own infrastructure to run.
• Grafana Cloud Free: Includes 3 users for Grafana OnCall, 10k series for Prometheus metrics, 50GB of logs, and more. Phone and SMS notifications are not included.
• Grafana Cloud Pro: $299/month (base price) plus usage-based pricing. Includes 5 users for Grafana OnCall and adds phone/SMS notifications.
• Grafana Cloud Advanced: Custom pricing. Offers unlimited users for Grafana OnCall.

The key takeaway is the viability of the free options for small teams.

Verdict

For a small team leaving Opsgenie and wary of high per-seat costs, Grafana OnCall is an excellent starting point, especially if you already use Grafana for monitoring. The free, self-hosted version provides all the core functionality needed for on-call scheduling without the financial overhead. The free tier of Grafana Cloud is also a compelling option for those who want to avoid managing more infrastructure. You are trading the mature, feature-rich environment of a dedicated provider for the convenience and cost-savings of an integrated platform. If your scheduling needs are straightforward and your team lives in Slack and Grafana, it's the right choice.

What We'd Test Next

A v2 review would require a full implementation. First, we would configure a multi-person rota with several vacation overrides to directly test the user's pain point from the source signal. Second, we would measure notification latency across all channels (Slack, push, SMS, phone call) from alert firing to delivery. Finally, we would compare the mobile app's usability for acknowledging, re-assigning, and silencing alerts against the PagerDuty mobile app, which is often considered the industry standard for on-the-go incident response.

The investor read

Grafana OnCall is not a PagerDuty-killer; it's a moat-builder for Grafana's core observability platform. By bundling a 'good enough' on-call tool for free, Grafana Labs increases switching costs and captures a larger share of the overall observability budget from customers who would otherwise pay a separate vendor. This commoditization of adjacent tooling is a classic open-source business strategy. The play isn't to win the standalone incident management market, but to make the Grafana Cloud offering an indispensable, all-in-one platform for engineering teams. It signals a broader trend of platform consolidation, where point solutions for monitoring, logging, and incident response are being absorbed into integrated suites. Investment theses should focus on the platform with the strongest ecosystem, not the best point solution.

Pull quote: “For a devops team managing its own rota, Grafana OnCall provides 90% of the necessary functionality at 0% of the cost.”