---
title: "Escalate issues from the Service Center | Grafana Plugins documentation"
description: "Learn how to escalate issues and declare incidents directly from the Service Center using Grafana IRM"
---

# Escalate issues from the Service Center

The [Service Center](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/slo/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](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/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](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/slo/service-center/#assign-a-team-to-a-service)
- [Create an on-call schedule](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/manage/on-call-schedules/) with active participants for each team
- [Enable the manual direct paging integration](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/configure/integrations/integration-reference/oncall/manual/) to escalate to a team
- [Access to the Teams API](/docs/grafana/latest/developers/http_api/team/#team-api) to view on-call users

> Note
> 
> You can still declare incidents and open the escalation drawer without access to the Teams API.

## 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](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/use/respond-to-alerts/).

## 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](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/incident/manage/declare-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](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/slo/service-center/#assign-a-team-to-a-service)
- [Create or assign an active schedule](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/oncall/manage/on-call-schedules/)

## 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](/docs/grafana/latest/developers/http_api/team/#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](/docs/grafana-cloud/alerting-and-irm/irm/oncall/manage/user-and-team-management/#roles-and-permissions).