Grafana OnCall OSS in maintenance mode: your questions answered
At Grafana Labs, we believe in treating everyone with respect, and a core aspect of respect is clear and transparent communication. When we decided to move Grafana OnCall (OSS) into maintenance mode, we knew that along with the public announcement, there would be a lot of questions. As with re-licensing our core projects to AGPLv3 and our announcement of Grafana Mimir, we asked everyone in the company to ask us the hard questions about this move, and our team set out to give honest answers in this blog post.
What is the TL;DR?
As of today (2025-03-11), Grafana OnCall (OSS) is in maintenance mode. It will be archived in one year on 2026-03-24.
Maintenance mode means that we will still provide fixes for critical bugs and for valid CVEs with a CVSS score of 7.0 or higher.
We are publishing this blog post, as well as technical documentation, to give Grafana OnCall (OSS) users the information they need plus a year of time to plan the future of their deployments.
OnCall (OSS) deployments will continue to work during this time. This ensures all users have enough time to plan, synchronize, and engineer instead of having to fight another fire.
Grafana OnCall (OSS) remains fully open source, licensed under AGPLv3. If the community decides to fork OnCall and carry it forward, we will support them with best reasonable effort.
At the same time, we are launching a new unified Grafana Cloud IRM app, bringing together the functionality and workflows of the existing, separate OnCall (Cloud) and Incident apps into one seamless experience in Grafana Cloud.
Skip to the timeline at the end if you’re in a hurry.
What is Grafana Cloud IRM?
The new unified Grafana Cloud IRM app brings together the functionality and workflows of the existing, separate OnCall (Cloud) and Incident apps into one seamless experience in Grafana Cloud. This enables us to provide a consistent UI/UX, common configuration patterns, and deeper integrations.
What is Grafana Incident?
Grafana Incident is a closed source, cloud-only incident management tool in Grafana Cloud that makes incident management easier by providing a chat, mobile, and web UI to manage incidents. Its features include routine task automation, automatic anomaly detection, and auto generation of incident timelines for post-incident analysis.
What is Grafana OnCall (Cloud)?
Grafana OnCall (Cloud) is a configurable on-call management tool in Grafana Cloud. It allows you to collect and analyze alerts from multiple monitoring systems, manage your on-call schedules, and make sure your alerts are routed to the right engineers, at the right time, and via the notification channels that each engineer prefers.
What is Grafana OnCall (OSS)?
Grafana OnCall (OSS) is an open source project with a similar feature set as Grafana OnCall (Cloud). It is the technology that has powered Grafana OnCall (Cloud) up to this point.
Why do those two have the same name?
No good reason.
Normally, our open source projects have fun code names and our products have very descriptive names. The two always share the same starting letter.
We made a mistake in naming here, causing confusion even amongst ourselves, and will try not to make this mistake again.
Why this change?
One of the reasons why software from Grafana is successful is because we have one of the highest, if not the highest, feature velocities in the observability space. The software engineers working on both OnCall and Incident have long considered as tech debt the overhead of maintaining two closely coupled yet separate codebases, one of which was open source and one of which was closed source.
Why now?
There were major architectural decisions to be made, and we could not delay this decision any further. If anything, our software engineers would have preferred to make this move earlier.
Are you close sourcing OnCall (OSS)?
No. Grafana OnCall (OSS) will remain fully open source, licensed under AGPLv3.
We are, however, no longer contributing to Grafana OnCall (OSS) outside of critical bug fixes and security fixes.
What will happen to OnCall (OSS)?
OnCall (OSS) is now in maintenance mode and will be archived in one year, on 2026-03-24.
Maintenance mode means that we will still provide fixes for critical bugs and for valid CVEs with a CVSS score of 7.0 or higher.
Is Grafana Labs no longer committed to open source?
Grafana Labs remains committed to open source.
The vast majority of our code is open source. We keep hiring, and we keep investing those hires in open source work. In GitHub, the Grafana org is ranked 49th by total stars, and the grafana/grafana repository is ranked 119th globally. Grafana Labs engineers continue to carry the majority of the Prometheus work. We invest significant efforts into improving OpenTelemetry, through ensuring compatibility between Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, helping with usability and efficiency improvements, contributing Grafana Beyla (an eBPF-based auto-instrumentation tool) upstream, and more. We have also increased hiring for upstream OpenTelemetry roles.
Are you trying to force OnCall (OSS) users to migrate to Grafana Cloud?
No.
We want to give everyone as much time as possible to make their own engineering and business decisions. It’s commonly considered good practice to have incident response hosted some place else in case there’s a major outage with your own infrastructure, similar to how most status pages, such as the Grafana status page, are commonly hosted and updated independently from the main infrastructure.
If you are considering a hosted solution, we certainly have opinions on what the most robust tool is that best aligns with the people who actually do the work.
If you prefer a different hosted solution, that’s fine.
If you prefer an open source and self-hosted solution, we hope the information in this blog post gives you a good starting point and enough time.
Can I just take and fork OnCall (OSS)?
Yes. Matter of fact, we encourage you to.
If you do not have a common space for finding and working with like-minded people yet, we invite you to open an issue on https://github.com/grafana/oncall/issues/, or to open a thread on https://community.grafana.com/.
We will not try to prevent anyone from forking OnCall (OSS), and we will support new maintainers where it’s reasonably possible.
What license is OnCall (OSS) under?
OnCall (OSS) is licensed under AGPLv3.
Will the Grafana IRM mobile app continue working with OnCall (OSS)?
Yes, the Grafana IRM mobile app will keep working with self-hosted OnCall (OSS) stacks until 2026-03-24. During this time, there will be a banner in the app to inform users and to link to our migration guide.
We are also committing to maintain API backwards compatibility with the Grafana IRM mobile app until that date. However, it isn’t feasible to support the mobile app indefinitely for two key reasons:
- Long-term API compatibility: The app published to app stores today serves both OnCall (OSS) and Grafana Cloud IRM, making it increasingly difficult to maintain backwards compatibility for the OSS API.
- Push notification relay: Grafana OnCall (OSS) currently relies on Grafana Cloud as a push notification relay, and support in general for these Cloud Connection features will also end on 2026-03-24. (See more information in the question below.)
Will SMS, phone, and push notifications still work with Grafana OnCall (OSS)?
Grafana OnCall (OSS) currently relies on Cloud Connection with Grafana Cloud to support SMS, phone, and push notifications. This connection will be deprecated on 2026-03-24, so you will need to migrate to alternative notification solutions.
For phone and SMS notifications, you can do one of the following:
- Use a third-party provider – Configure Twilio, Exotel, or Zvonok to send SMS and phone calls. See our documentation for more information.
- Use webhooks – Set up OnCall (OSS) to trigger custom SMS and call workflows via self-hosted solutions.
Please refer to the documentation for more details.
For push notifications, we recently merged a change allowing outgoing webhooks in personal notification rules. This makes it possible to use third-party services like Pushover, Gotify, or ntfy to continue receiving push notifications (including those that can override “Do Not Disturb”).
Please refer to the documentation for more details.
What is the timeline for these changes?
2025-03-06: Private information to Grafana Cloud customers using Grafana OnCall (OSS)
2025-03-11: Grafana Cloud IRM unified app announced
2025-03-11: Public announcement that Grafana OnCall (OSS) is in maintenance mode, fixing only critical bugs and valid CVEs with a CVSS score of 7.0 or higher
2025-04-21: Grafana OnCall (Cloud) app to be sunset as customers can use Grafana Cloud IRM app
2025-04-21: Grafana Incident app to be sunset as customers can use Grafana Cloud IRM app
2026-03-24: Grafana OnCall (OSS) to be archived
2026-03-24: Grafana OnCall (OSS) Cloud Connection to be disabled
