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Phone and SMS notifications

Grafana IRM includes phone calls and SMS as notification options for users. While the IRM mobile app with push notifications is the recommended primary notification method, phone calls and SMS serve as valuable backup channels, especially for critical alerts.

Note

Not all countries are supported for SMS and phone calls. See the Supported countries section for details.

How phone and SMS notifications work

SMS bundling behavior

Grafana IRM reduces alert noise and distraction by bundling SMS notifications:

  1. The first alert group triggers an immediate SMS notification
  2. A 2-minute “waiting period” follows, during which additional alerts are bundled
  3. After this period, a single SMS with all alert information is sent

Notifications are bundled based on their importance. Alerts from “default” and “important” notification policies are bundled separately.

Example bundled notification

If a user needs to be notified about 5 alert groups from 2 different integrations (3 from “Grafana Alerting” and 2 from “Health Check”), they will receive:

  1. An immediate notification for the first alert group
  2. A bundled SMS for the remaining alerts after 2 minutes

The bundled SMS would appear as:

Grafana IRM: Alert groups #101, #102, #103 and 1 more, from stack: TestOrg, integrations: GrafanaAlerting and 1 more.

Phone call behavior

Phone calls are typically used as a more intrusive notification method for critical alerts or when other notification methods haven’t been acknowledged.

Add phone notifications to your notification rules

First, verify your phone number:

  1. Navigate to the IRM tab of your Profile
  2. Select Phone verification
  3. Enter your phone number and country code
  4. Click Send verification code and enter the code received via SMS

After verifying your phone number, you can add phone calls and SMS to your notification rules:

  1. Navigate to the IRM tab of your Profile
  2. Click Notification rules
  3. Edit either your Default notification rules or Important notification rules
  4. Click Add notification step
  5. Select Notify by and choose either SMS or Phone call
  6. Set the appropriate timing
  7. Click Save

Live call routing

Grafana IRM supports routing incoming calls to the currently on-call engineer, enabling direct communication during incidents.

For guidance on configuring live call routing, refer to:

Additional information

Costs and rate limits

  • Costs: There are no additional costs for outgoing calls or SMS notifications
  • Rate limits: There are no specific rate limits, but we reserve the right to stop sending SMS/calls in case of abnormal volume

Grafana IRM phone numbers

To learn the phone number used by Grafana IRM, make a test call from the Phone Verification tab.

Supported countries

Not all countries are supported for SMS and phone calls. Grafana IRM falls within Twilio’s suggested list of supported countries.

Note

There are cases when IRM is not able to make phone calls or send SMS to certain regions or specific phone numbers. We recommend using the mobile app notifications as the main notification method with phone call/SMS being an alternative, at your own risk, option.

Refer to the following list for countries currently supported by Grafana IRM for SMS and phone notifications: