Add participants to an incident

Achieve effective collaboration during critical incidents with the Add Participants feature, enabling users to swiftly invite others to manage and observe incidents.

The Add Participants functionality is best when paired with OnCall, utilizing users configured roles, teams, schedules, and notification preferences. Whether you’re leveraging OnCall or not, this feature allows you to quickly bring in the right people.

Key features

OnCall integration: Leverage existing configurations with OnCall, respecting user settings, schedules, and escalation chains.
Invite individuals: Available to all users. The default notifications method is email, with OnCall Direct Paging as a backup.
Invite teams: For OnCall users with configured teams, this feature adheres to the team’s defined escalation chains. Users without such configurations are prompted to configure their OnCall teams.

Invite participants

If you haven’t already, declare an incident on Grafana Cloud by navigating to Alerts & IRM → Incidents and selecting Declare Incident. For detailed instructions, refer to Declare Incident.

To invite additional responders to an incident, follow these steps:

Navigate to the Participants section of your active incident to manage invitations.
Click + Invite.
Search and select Users or Teams.

Troubleshoot missing teams

If you don’t see the team you’re looking for, please verify that:
1. The team is registered on the Grafana Teams page.
2. The team has a Direct Paging integration with configured notification channels.

Respond to invitations

Upon receiving an invitation, users are provided with an incident briefing through a notification and a pop-up dialog. Invited user have the choice to respond in three ways: accept, decline, or dismiss.

OnCall Alert Group Status: When you respond to an invitation, that response automatically updates the related OnCall alert group status accordingly.

Accept / Decline: Changes the alert group status to “Resolved,” effectively halting potential escalation chains.
Dismiss: Leaves the alert group status unchanged.

If you dismiss the initial invitation, you can still accept or decline from the incident page.

To proceed:

Open the incident page and navigate to the Participants section.
Click on the corresponding icon next to the invitee’s name:
- ✔️ Checkmark: Accept the invitation.
- 🗑️ Trash: Decline the invitation and remove the participant.

Manage invitations and participants

On-call awareness: Warns when inviting users outside of their on-call hours.
User experience: Ensures ease of use, with or without OnCall configuration.
Notification flexibility: Supports various notification channels based on user preferences.

Understand the invitation process

All invitations are delivered using OnCall Direct Paging integration.

Individual invitations: Respect the user’s notification preferences set on the User page in OnCall.
Team invitations: Sent to the on-call team member as per their schedule, if the selected team has added their schedule to the Direct Paging integration.

Invitations to individuals can be delivered via default or important notification settings. For more information, consult the OnCall documentation.

Additional actions for managing invitations and participants are available:

View the alert group that paged user or team. It may be useful to check the timeline of delivered notifications.
Remove individual or team, which stops remaining notifications in the escalation chain (if set) and resolves the alert group.