Is it still wise to self-host Grafana OnCall now that it’s archived?

If you want to stay closer to a self-managed stack, you could send Grafana alerts through Alertmanager and use a separate provider for actual phone or SMS escalation. That keeps monitoring under your control without relying on an archived paging application.

I’d avoid deploying the archived OSS version for a new setup. Its development moved toward Grafana IRM, so the old repository is effectively frozen and won’t receive regular security or bug fixes. Paging needs to be dependable during an incident, so using unmaintained software seems like a risky place to save money.

I generally wouldn’t self-host the system responsible for your first line of defense. If that service fails, you may not know about the original outage. We looked at PagerDuty but found the cost difficult to justify, and ultimately chose Rootly instead. The right choice depends on your budget and workflow.

We replaced it with PagerDuty. It integrates easily with Grafana and supports SMS, email, and phone-call notifications. It’s worth comparing pricing and features, but the setup has been straightforward for us.

Other maintained options include SIGNL4, OnPage, Opsgenie, and Jira Service Management. They can integrate with Grafana, so you can keep Grafana for alert generation while using a dedicated service for escalation, acknowledgements, and notifications.