[HN Gopher] Grafana Labs launches free incident management tool ...
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       Grafana Labs launches free incident management tool in Grafana
       Cloud
        
       Author : matryer
       Score  : 127 points
       Date   : 2022-09-13 14:54 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (grafana.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (grafana.com)
        
       | CSMastermind wrote:
       | Seems great if you're already on the Grafana platform.
       | 
       | One thing I'd say is that I find the "react with a robot emoji on
       | slack to add information to the timeline" as a little kluge,
       | hopefully that's not the only mechanism for doing that.
       | 
       | Also does this tool have a postmortem workflow? I didn't see one
       | in the documentation and that seems like an important part of the
       | incident response process.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | drc wrote:
         | Thanks for feedback re: robot emoji. You can also use a
         | backslash command if you want to add a new piece of text to the
         | timeline from Slack.
         | 
         | re: postmortem workflow. The timeline view is built to help
         | postmortems, one of the ways we're doing this is making it easy
         | to paste the info from the timeline as rich text or markdown
         | from the timeline into your post mortem workflow. You'll see
         | that on the top right of the timeline view. We have a lot more
         | ideas in this area and will be investing in this.
         | 
         | Curious if there is specific features you'd like for
         | postmortems?
        
           | oxfordmale wrote:
           | Are you going to upgrade this feature to an Enterprise
           | license one day and then revoke access without a grace
           | period? This happened to one of our Grafana plugins and
           | resulted in a several day outage while we scrambled to sort
           | out the payment.
           | 
           | As your company has shown zero respect for its customers, I
           | will not be using any of your systems.To be absolutely clear
           | it is fair to charge for any of your products, however, if
           | you change it from freemium to paid you can't just pull the
           | plug without reaching out.
        
           | lstamour wrote:
           | Another suggestion re gathering data or threads from Slack:
           | using Message Shortcuts for greater
           | visibility/discoverability?
           | https://api.slack.com/interactivity/shortcuts Might need to
           | combine this with Slack modals for adding details (if it lets
           | you do this)
        
       | igetspam wrote:
       | Are you planning any posts on comparing your new incident tool to
       | other services? We currently use incident.io and are happy with
       | it but we pay a lot for Grafana Cloud right now so it's worth
       | considering if we can reduce spend elsewhere.
       | 
       | Edit: We're happy with incident.io but free is compelling if the
       | product is good and having a single view for observability is
       | useful
        
         | sjwhitworth wrote:
         | Hey, incident.io CEO here. Glad to hear you're happy with the
         | product. The people at Grafana are great - congrats on the
         | launch! Will have to take the product for a spin sometime :)
        
           | farhan0410 wrote:
           | Thanks Stephen (product marketing lead for Incident) - we are
           | also big fans of what y'all are building!
        
         | farhan0410 wrote:
         | totally understand that and great shout.
         | 
         | happy to pull something together for ya if there are particular
         | workflows you are most interested in comparing
         | 
         | farhan.manjiyani@grafana.com
        
         | matryer wrote:
         | They're both great tools :) Lots of similarities, and plenty of
         | differences.
        
       | xwowsersx wrote:
       | I'm looking into Grafana Cloud currently. We run a few services
       | across 4 different environments. I'd like to have a single place
       | to view metrics as well as response times for various API
       | endpoints, metrics related to RDS, etc. Also interested in
       | incident management tool. We have around 30 EC2 instances running
       | currently but will be scaling that up further. What can I expect
       | in terms of total pricing? Perhaps hopping on a call with someone
       | for Grafana would make the most sense?
        
         | divygoel wrote:
         | Hey @xwowsersx - Happy to help here! Would you mind sending me
         | a note at divy.goel@grafana.com and we can coordinate a time to
         | connect? Looking forward to it!
        
           | xwowsersx wrote:
           | Emailed. Thanks!
        
       | donavanm wrote:
       | How do you/users programmatically quantify MTTR (and related
       | metrics) per incident, or in aggregate? Although it shades
       | towards problem management this would seem necessary to achieve
       | the claim of "reduces mean time to repair (MTTR)."
       | 
       | Bonus questions, are you tracking or driving improvement in the
       | related times for detection/response/mitigate/recover?
       | 
       | Disclosure: Principal at AWS currently in a similar apace. Though
       | I ask in a personal capacity and interest.
        
       | jjtang1 wrote:
        
       | matryer wrote:
       | I work at Grafana, so AMA about the tool :)
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | mrtimbo wrote:
         | Any plans for Teams integration? We recently switched all our
         | bots over from Slack.
        
           | matryer wrote:
           | You don't need Slack to use the tool, but yeah, a Teams
           | integration is on the list, and will probably drop early next
           | year.
        
         | prepend wrote:
         | Any plans to have this FedRAMP certified so it can be used in
         | US federal government incident management?
        
           | SkoChippy wrote:
           | No immediate plans for FedRAMP, but this may be on the
           | roadmap in future quarters.
        
         | solarkraft wrote:
         | Is there a chance we'll see it open sourced / a self hosting
         | option?
        
           | matryer wrote:
           | No plans currently, but a self hosted option seems
           | reasonable. Although, most people like their emergency tech
           | not hosted on their own tech :)
        
             | jrockway wrote:
             | I dunno, I don't really mind self-hosting monitoring
             | infrastructure. I basically pay for a website uptime
             | checker to check that Alertmanager is working. If
             | Alertmanager is down, obviously you have to manually check
             | to see what else is down, but it doesn't fail open.
             | 
             | I wrote a little glue to make this straightforward for
             | anyone else who uses Prometheus/Alertmanager:
             | https://github.com/jrockway/alertmanager-status This
             | ensures that the website check checks the health of the
             | whole alerting pipeline; Prometheus has an always firing
             | alert, Alertmanager is set to send that alert to
             | alertmanager-status, and alertmanager-status starts failing
             | its external health check if it isn't seeing that alert
             | firing at the configured interval. If one of [Prometheus,
             | Alertmanager, alertmanager-status] fails, then your website
             | health check fails.
        
             | trog wrote:
             | > No plans currently, but a self hosted option seems
             | reasonable. Although, most people like their emergency tech
             | not hosted on their own tech :)
             | 
             | FWIW our core application is hosted in AWS but we maintain
             | our own Grafana infrastructure independently. So it's not
             | hosted on our own tech, per se, though we're still
             | responsible for keeping it online.
             | 
             | This looks great & would also love to see a self-hosted
             | option. Honestly the more stuff like this that gets rolled
             | into the OSS Grafana it actually makes me both more likely
             | to try it and then more likely to eventually end up on the
             | managed Grafana Cloud, as I will inevitably get sick of
             | trying to maintain our own separate infra & the business
             | case for centralising in Cloud makes more and more sense.
        
             | aalbertson wrote:
             | Being not hosted on my same tech is one thing, still being
             | self hosted so I can externalize it for a federal
             | implementation is another. Definitely needs to be self
             | hosted for ALL components. :)
        
               | matryer wrote:
               | Yeah makes sense. I'll add your vote to the list :)
        
         | buro9 wrote:
         | I also work at Grafana Labs, and could just Slack you... but as
         | you've asked...
         | 
         | Incident is available in the free tier, that's awesome... are
         | there any limitations on that at all? Is the free tier version
         | of Incident as fully featured as the paid tiers?
        
           | farhan0410 wrote:
           | Yes Grafana Incident is available (fully featured) in the
           | free tier of Grafana Cloud
        
           | matryer wrote:
           | Hello :) The free version is fully featured, so you just
           | limited to number of users in the free tier (three).
        
         | DrRobinson wrote:
         | It looks really cool and since we already use Grafana it would
         | be a good fit for us, but for on call purposes Slack isn't very
         | useful. If we were to migrate from PagerDuty to this, we would
         | need an app that can override do not distrub and wake people
         | up. Do you have any plans for any such app?
        
           | drc wrote:
           | hi, disclaimer I work at Grafana,
           | 
           | We have plans to build a native mobile app for ios & android
           | for OnCall that would let you achieve this over the next few
           | months.
           | 
           | OnCall is a separate product from Incident. It's available
           | via OSS and Cloud. Incident and OnCall work well together, or
           | you can use either as standalone!
        
             | thayne wrote:
             | I'm a little curious how this will work with self hosted
             | OnCall. Will the user need to set up their own push
             | notification accounts for apple and Google, will it used a
             | centralized service from Grafana, will it have a background
             | service that polls the hosted OnCall service, or something
             | else?
        
       | aglazer wrote:
       | This looks great and cool to see more innovation in the space.
       | 
       | We've been using Rootly https://rootly.com and love it.
        
         | jjtang1 wrote:
         | Thank you for the kind words, Aaron. Been a pleasure partnering
         | with the Taplytics team!
         | 
         | We work with 100s of companies like Canva, Grammarly, OpenSea
         | and others to help build a consistent incident response process
         | on Slack if you're interested. Happy to give you the no-BS
         | sales demo.
         | 
         | FWIW - we are big fans of Grafana and have a native integration
         | (think automatic Grafana metric/dashboard snapshots into
         | #incident channel.
        
       | nikolay wrote:
       | All good except that Grafana Cloud is super expensive when you
       | consider it per metric. This probably is the most expensive
       | service per bit of data!
        
         | divygoel wrote:
         | Hey @nikolay! I work at Grafana Labs & focus on pricing - would
         | you be up for a 15 minute chat to discuss this further? If so,
         | feel free to either drop me a note at divy.goel@grafana.com or
         | let me know how best to reach you :)
        
           | oxfordmale wrote:
           | Recently you pulled one of our Grafana plugins without notice
           | as you had upgraded this to an Enterprise license. We are
           | more than happy yo pay, however, pulling production support
           | without reaching out to negotiate a license is a d** move. We
           | suffered an outage of several days while scrambling to get
           | the payment approved. Luckily we didn't suffer any major
           | outage in that window.
        
             | divygoel wrote:
             | Hey @oxfordmale - Sorry to hear about your experience.
             | Would you be open to a live discussion so I can understand
             | your issue further?
             | 
             | Surprised to hear this as none of our Enterprise plugins
             | had a change in licensing (i.e. going from free to paid, or
             | shifting within paid tiers) as far as I am aware. Would
             | love to dig into this further.
             | 
             | If you're up for it, feel free to send me a note at
             | divy.goel@grafana.com or let me know how best to reach you!
        
           | gaffneyc wrote:
           | We recently swapped our metrics to Grafana Cloud and were
           | really surprised (despite being documented) that pricing is
           | based on samples per minute not metrics series. So, for
           | example, if we send a metric every 15s (the Prometheus
           | default) then we get charged as if that were four separate
           | metrics. Support was very helpful explaining everything and
           | they reversed the charge but it still feels weird.
        
             | divygoel wrote:
             | Thanks for the feedback! Agree that this can be made more
             | clear and we will work on that.
        
         | edumucelli wrote:
         | Yes, I have started using their cloud for a personal project.
         | Ended up going back to self-hosted. Great thing their product
         | is open source.
        
           | divygoel wrote:
           | Hey @edumucelli - Would love to learn more about your
           | experience and identify where we can make improvements. If
           | you're up for a 15 min chat, please send me a note at
           | divy.goel@grafana.com or let me know how best to reach you!
        
         | bcjordan wrote:
         | Interesting, I'm using Grafana Cloud for just a few Prometheus
         | metrics at the moment and have found it reasonable so far so am
         | interested in what scale up looks like.
         | 
         | I'm curious--what other sorts of services are you referring to
         | in your comparison?
        
       | altdataseller wrote:
       | Anyone replacing PAgerduty with this?
        
         | buro9 wrote:
         | I think that would be Grafana OnCall
         | https://grafana.com/products/oncall/
         | 
         | Internally we (Grafana Labs) already have replaced PagerDuty
         | and are using it for our teams running critical systems.
        
         | [deleted]
        
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       (page generated 2022-09-13 23:02 UTC)