Documentation Grafana Cloud Alerts and IRM SLO Service Center Escalate issues

Escalate issues from the Service Center

The Service Center in Grafana SLO allows you to respond quickly to issues affecting your services. If you see signs of service degradation, a missed SLO, or another problem, you can take direct action:

• Escalate the issue to a responsible team or individual
• Declare an incident, automatically labeled with the affected service
• View and contact the current on-call responder for the service

These actions leverage your Grafana IRM configuration to help teams streamline incident response from within the service context.

Before you begin

To use these features, you must configure the following:

• Assign a team to each service
• Create an on-call schedule with active participants for each team
• Enable the manual direct paging integration to escalate to a team
• Access to the Teams API to view on-call users

Escalate an issue

When you escalate an issue from the Service Center, it connects directly to your IRM escalation workflows.

To escalate a service-related issue:

1. In the service list or service details page,, click the More menu.
2. Select Escalate.
3. In the escalation drawer, add a description of the issue.
4. If the service has a team assigned, that team is added as a default escalation participant. Otherwise, add users or teams manually.
5. Click Create.

The escalation creates an alert in Grafana IRM with:

• The service name as a label
• Your description as the alert message
• The selected teams/users as participants
• A link back to the service in the Service Center

For more information, refer to Respond to alerts in Grafana IRM.

Declare an incident

You can declare an incident in Grafana IRM directly from the Service Center:

1. In the service list or service details page, click the More menu.
2. Select Declare incident.
3. The incident form opens with the service name prefilled as a label.
4. Provide a title, severity, and any other details.
5. Click Declare incident.

For more information, refer to the Declare an incident documentation.

View who is on-call for a service

The service center shows the current on-call user based on your Grafana IRM on-call schedules.

On the service details page, you can view the current on-call user if:

• The service has a team assigned
• That team has an active on-call schedule with at least one participant

This section displays:

• The avatar and name of the on-call user(s)
• The associated schedule
• On-call status indicator

To enable this view:

• Assign a team to the service
• Create or assign an active schedule

Contact the on-call person for a service

From the service center, you can contact responders directly through the IRM on-call user card.

Hover over the on-call avatar to reveal:

• The user’s local time
• Whether the user is within working hours
• Escalate: Opens the escalation drawer with the user added by default
• Slack DM: Opens a direct message (if Slack is connected)

Even if direct paging is not enabled for the team, you can still escalate to an individual user from the avatar card.

Access requirements

• All authenticated users can view details of their own teams and declare incidents
• Organization admins can manage and view all teams

To view teams and on-call information, you must have access to the Grafana Team API.

To Escalate an issue from the Service Center, you must have one of the following roles:

• Editor basic role
• Alert Groups Direct Paging role
• OnCaller role

For details on Grafana IRM permissions, refer to Roles and permissions.