Get started with Grafana Incident

Grafana Incident is an intelligent incident management tool that helps optimize your incident response. You can use Incident to integrate with your existing tools, automate administrative tasks and meet your team where they are so you can focus on incident resolution.

Follow this guide or the in-product Setup Wizard to perform the initial configuration to get started with Incident.

Before you begin

Grafana Incident is included in Grafana’s Incident Response & Management (IRM) solution. Grafana IRM includes access to Grafana Incident and Grafana OnCall, which is available as a Grafana Cloud add-on.

Grafana IRM is available on Grafana Cloud Free, Pro, and Advanced plans. If you’re not already using Grafana Cloud, create a free account to get started.
Grafana Cloud Admins can configure Grafana Incident.

For more information, see Grafana Pricing.

Install Grafana Incident

If you haven’t done so already, use the following steps to enable the Incident app:

In your Grafana Cloud stack, click Alerts & IRM in the left-side menu.
Click the Incident tile to enable the app for your Grafana Cloud instance.
Once Grafana Incident is enabled it is accessible to users in your organization.

Grafana Incident is now enabled for your Grafana Cloud instance and accessible to users.

Configure integrations

Integrations extend the capabilities of Grafana Incident into your existing tools. While installing 1-2 integrations before declaring an incident is recommended, it’s not required, so you can declare a drill incident at any time.

Install Slack integration

Grafana Incident works best when integrated with Slack. Since this is your first time using Grafana Incident, we recommend installing the Slack integration first.

Tip: Create a #incident channel in your Slack workspace to designate as the default channel for Grafana Incident to post announcements.

To install the Slack integration for Grafana Incident:

Click Incidents in the left-side menu.
Click Integrations.
Click the Slack tile and then Install Integration.
Follow the on-screen instructions and Slack prompts to enter your workspace URL and Slack credentials.
Select your default Slack channel in the dropdown menu, and click Allow.

Once you’re redirected back to Grafana Incident, the Incident Chatbot is automatically added to your default channel.

For further configuration guidance, refer to Slack integration for Grafana IRM.

Install video conference integration

Grafana Incident integrates with your tools to automate tasks like creating a Zoom or Google Meet space when an incident is declared.

Click Incidents in the left-side menu.
Click Integrations.
Select your preferred video conference integration, and click Install Integration.
Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the integration setup.

For further installation instructions, refer to:

Review settings

Customizable incident settings allow you to define all aspects of an incident to fit your response needs and team workflows. These settings are pre-configured with common values to get you started so that you can customize these further later on.

With these settings, you can:

Add incident labels
Define incident severities and statuses
Customize Slack channel prefixes

Learn more at Configure Grafana Incident settings.

Declare a drill incident

Now that your initial configuration is complete, try Grafana Incident by creating a drill incident:

From Grafana Incident, click + Drill.
Provide a brief title for your test incident.
Choose values for the remaining incident fields, or you can leave the defaults.
Click + Start a drill, then open the newly created incident Slack channel and explore the functionality of Grafana Incident.

The person declaring the incident will automatically become the commander.