---
title: "Reduce Grafana Cloud IRM costs | Grafana Cloud documentation"
description: "Reduce your Grafana Cloud IRM costs."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# Reduce Grafana Cloud IRM costs

You can reduce Grafana Cloud Incident Response & Management (IRM) costs by limiting how many monthly active IRM users your organization uses each month. Refer to [Understand your Grafana Cloud IRM invoice](/docs/grafana-cloud/cost-management-and-billing/manage-invoices/understand-your-invoice/irm-invoice/) for how monthly active IRM users are measured and billed.

## Review your usage

Review IRM usage before you change schedules or escalation chains so you can see which users drive monthly active user counts.

You can review usage on the [Billing and Usage dashboard](/docs/grafana-cloud/cost-management-and-billing/manage-invoices/understand-your-invoice/#billing-and-usage-dashboard) on the IRM usage panels. You can also open **Cost Management and Billing** > **Usage** and select **IRM** for usage trends and cost details. Refer to [Monitor usage](/docs/grafana-cloud/cost-management-and-billing/understand-usage-cost/).

You can configure [usage and cost alerts](/docs/grafana-cloud/cost-management-and-billing/usage-cost-alerts/) or [billing usage alerts](/docs/grafana-cloud/cost-management-and-billing/set-up-usage-alerts/) from the Billing and Usage dashboard to notify your team when IRM usage exceeds expected levels.

## Understand billable usage

An active IRM user is someone who meets any of the following criteria during the calendar month:

- Is included in an OnCall schedule or escalation chain
- Changes the status of an alert group or OnCall configuration
- Receives a page or pages another user
- Creates, edits, or updates an incident

> Note
> 
> Being listed in a schedule or escalation chain can make a user billable for the month, even if they do not respond to alerts. Review schedules and chains regularly to avoid paying for users who no longer participate in on-call.

Monthly active user counts reset at the start of each calendar month.

## Reduce your usage

The most effective ways to control IRM costs focus on who is configured to respond—not on how many alerts you receive.

### Limit users in on-call schedules

On-call schedules define who can be paged when escalation chains run. Each user assigned to a schedule can count toward monthly active users.

To reduce billable users:

- Remove users who no longer participate in on-call from schedules and rotations.
- Use the smallest rotation pool that still meets coverage needs. For example, a weekly rotation with three engineers over listing every engineer on the team.
- Use [user groups in rotations](/docs/irm/on-call-schedules/) when multiple people cover the same shift, instead of adding duplicate individual users across overlapping schedules.
- Review [imported schedules](/docs/irm/on-call-schedules/import-schedules/) and external calendars for stale entries that still include former team members.

Refer to [Best practices for on-call schedules](/docs/irm/guides/best-practices/schedules/) for rotation design and coverage quality.

### Streamline escalation chains

Escalation chains determine who is notified when alerts fire. Users referenced in escalation steps can count as active even if they are rarely paged.

To reduce billable users:

- Replace **Notify all team members** steps with **Notify from on-call schedule** or **Notify users** steps that target only current responders.
- Prefer **Notify users one by one (round robin)** over notifying a large fixed list on every alert group.
- Avoid **Notify next on-call shift from Schedule** unless you need to page everyone in the upcoming shift. This step notifies all users in the next shift when parallel slots or layers exist.
- Use **Notify all Slack channel members** and **Notify Slack user group** steps with care. These steps can notify many people and increase the chance that additional users become active when they acknowledge or respond to alerts.
- Remove users from escalation chains when they leave the team or move to a non-on-call role.

Refer to [Configure escalation chains](/docs/irm/escalation-and-routing/escalation-chains/) and [Escalation chains best practices](/docs/irm/guides/best-practices/escalation-chains/).

### Reduce incidental active usage

Users can also become active when they change OnCall or alert group status, page others, or work in incidents.

To limit this usage:

- Use [IRM roles and permissions](/docs/irm/set-up/manage-access/roles-and-permissions/) to limit who can edit escalation chains, schedules, and integrations. For example, reserve **Escalation Chains Editor** and **Schedules Editor** roles for administrators or a small operations group.
- Limit **Alert Groups Direct Paging** to users who must manually page responders, instead of granting it broadly across the organization.
- Use a consistent incident workflow so only responders who own the incident create or update incident records.
- Train teams to page through defined escalation chains rather than using direct paging for broad groups of users.