How to migrate to Grafana IRM: find the right path for your organization
Hundreds of organizations have migrated from legacy incident response tools to Grafana IRM in recent years as they look to improve production reliability, reduce costs, and consolidate their tooling.
Grafana IRM, our incident response and management product, has helped organizations such as LATAM Airlines simplify stressful incidents with observability-native workflows, but every organization has its reservations about the actual migration process.
In this blog post, I’ll discuss three distinct paths available for migrating to Grafana IRM, helping you determine the best approach based on your team’s resources, timelines, and specific needs.
Why organizations are migrating to Grafana IRM
Before diving into the migration paths, I’ll quickly discuss the driving factors behind prioritizing a migration to Grafana IRM.
- Observability-native workflows: Grafana IRM users are able to resolve incidents more quickly because Grafana IRM is built into customers’ single pane of glass in Grafana Cloud. This means observability signals are naturally integrated into alerting, incident response, and incident collaboration processes.
- Tool consolidation: By integrating incident response and management into the broader Grafana ecosystem, organizations can reduce the number of tools they need to manage, simplifying operations and reducing overhead.
- Cost savings: Legacy incident response tools often come with hefty and inflexible licensing fees. They also charge premiums on basic governance and authorization features. Grafana IRM offers a more cost-effective approach with active user pricing. This provides usage elasticity so customers only pay for what they use.
With these benefits in mind, let’s explore the three migration paths available to you.
Path #1: Migration with professional services
For organizations looking to migrate at scale, under tight deadlines, or simply wishing to offload the migration process to experts, opting for professional services is an ideal choice. This path is particularly suitable for teams that want to minimize disruption to their day-to-day operations and ensure a smooth transition.
Estimated timeframe: typically three to four weeks, with 50 to 60 hours of professional service time.
Key benefits
Comprehensive support: From the initial audit to post-migration support, professional services handle every aspect of the migration, ensuring nothing is overlooked.
Reduced burden on your staff: By leveraging professional services, your internal teams can focus on their core responsibilities rather than getting bogged down with the intricacies of the migration process.
What professional services will do:
- Perform an audit: The first step in the process is a thorough audit of your existing incident response setup. This includes assessing your current tools, configurations, and workflows to create a tailored migration plan.
- Write Terraform scripts: Professional services can create customized Terraform scripts to facilitate the migration process for teams utilizing infrastructure as code (IaC).
- Set up customer testing: To reduce issues, testing environments are set up to validate the migrated configurations before going live.
- Provide end-user guidance: Professional services offer dedicated office hours to address any questions or concerns your team may have during the migration.
- Handle the heavy lifting: They take care of the bulk of the migration, ensuring that all configurations, integrations, and workflows are accurately transferred to Grafana IRM.
- Provide post-migration support: Professional services can address any issues that may arise and ensure your team is fully comfortable with the new setup.
Is professional services the path right for you?
If your organization is facing tight deadlines, lacks the internal resources to manage a large-scale migration, or simply prefers to rely on experts to ensure a flawless transition, then this path is likely the best fit.
Path #2: Self-migration with our IRM migrator tools
For teams with sufficient engineering resources and expertise in incident response management, Grafana Labs’ IRM migrator tools offer an efficient way to manage the migration process independently. This path is also specifically designed for organizations migrating away from tools like PagerDuty or Splunk OnCall (VictorOps).
Estimated time frame: typically three to four weeks, depending on the complexity of your setup.
Key benefits
Control and flexibility: Self-migration allows you to maintain control over the process, tailoring it to your specific needs and timelines.
Cost effective: By managing the migration in-house, you can avoid the costs associated with outsourcing.
Resources that can be migrated
The migrator tools support the migration of various critical resources, including:
- User notification rules: Ensure that your team continues to receive timely alerts and notifications.
- On-call schedules: Migrate on-call schedules to ensure seamless coverage and continuity.
- Escalation policies: Ensure that your escalation policies are accurately transferred to maintain the integrity of your incident response process.
- Services (integrations): Migrate service integrations to ensure continued connectivity with your monitoring and alerting tools.
- Event rules: Ask your account manager to discuss your specific use case.
Limitations
While the migrator tools provide a robust solution for most migrations, there are some limitations to be aware of:
- No OpsGenie support: Unfortunately, we do not have an OpsGenie migrator tool at this time.
- Integration support: Not all integration types are supported, which may require additional manual configuration.
- Timing discrepancies: There may be slight differences in timing between migrated notification/escalation rules. For example, a four-minute delay in PagerDuty might become a five-minute delay in Grafana IRM.
- Manual configuration: Some resources may require manual adjustments in PagerDuty before they can be successfully migrated.
Prerequisites
Before embarking on this path, ensure you have the necessary prerequisites in place:
- PagerDuty API user token: You’ll need to obtain a PagerDuty API user token to facilitate the migration. This can be done by following the instructions here.
- Splunk API ID and an API token: If you’re using Splunk instead, you’ll follow the same process. This can be done by following the instructions here.
Is self-migration with Grafana IRM migrator tools the right path for you?
If your team has the necessary engineering resources, expertise in incident response management, and is comfortable managing the migration process in-house, this path offers a balanced approach that combines control, flexibility, and efficiency.
Path #3: Self-migration without Grafana IRM migrator tools
For teams migrating from Opsgenie or another vendor not previously mentioned in this post—or those who prefer not to use the migrator tools—self-migration without these tools offers two distinct subpaths:
- As-code migration using Terraform
- Fully UI-based migration.
This path is ideal for teams with strong engineering resources, flexible timelines, and incident response expertise.
Subpath #1: As-code migration using the Terraform provider
This subpath is ideal for teams already leveraging IaC and comfortable working with Terraform. It offers a structured and repeatable approach to migration.
Estimated time frame: three to five weeks, depending on the complexity of your setup and the level of customization required.
Key benefits
IaC integration: As-code migration enables you to maintain your incident response configurations as code, ensuring consistency and traceability.
Flexibility: Terraform’s flexibility allows you to customize the migration process to suit your specific needs.
Challenges
Terraform competency: Your team will need to be proficient in Terraform to manage this migration path effectively.
Additional testing: Post-migration testing is crucial to ensure that all configurations have been accurately migrated and are functioning as expected.
Subpath #2: Migration completely in the UI
For smaller teams or those looking to test Grafana IRM on a smaller scale, a UI-migration offers a low-code, hands-on approach. However, it is the most time-consuming option.
Estimated time frame: four to six weeks, depending on the size of your team and the scope of the migration.
Key benefits
Low-code approach: This subpath requires minimal coding, making it accessible to teams without extensive engineering resources.
Hands-on control: The UI-based migration allows you to manually map out and recreate your incident response configurations, offering a high level of control over the process.
Challenges
Time-consuming: Due to the manual nature of this subpath, it can be time-intensive, especially for larger-scale migrations.
Scalability: While suitable for small-scale migrations, the time required increases significantly with the scale of the migration.
Is self-migrating without Grafana IRM migrator tools the right path for you?
This path provides flexibility and control for those who prefer a hands-on approach, or for teams migrating from Opsgenie or another unsupported vendor that have the engineering resources and expertise. The as-code migration is ideal for teams already using Terraform, while the UI-based migration is suitable for smaller, low-code migrations.
Start your Grafana IRM migration today
As more organizations recognize the benefits of switching from legacy incident response tools to Grafana IRM, the need for flexible, efficient migration paths has become increasingly important. Whether you choose to lean on professional services for an expedited migration, utilize Grafana’s IRM migrator tools for an in-house, efficient process, or opt for a hands-on, self-managed approach, Grafana offers flexibility in your preferred approach.
When planning your migration, it’s crucial to consider factors such as timelines, resource availability, and engineering competencies. By carefully evaluating these factors, you can make an informed decision that ensures a smooth transition to Grafana IRM, enabling your team to take full advantage of the workflows, cost savings, and tool consolidation.
If you want to learn more about Grafana IRM, check out our docs and find out why so many organizations are making the switch.
Grafana Cloud is the easiest way to get started with metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and more. We have a generous forever-free tier and plans for every use case. Sign up for free now!
