Grafana releases OnCall open source project

https://grafana.com/blog/2022/06/14/introducing-grafana-oncall-oss-open-source/

by netingle • 4 years ago

383 128 4 years ago

grafana.com

martypitt• 4 years ago

Congrats - this looks great, and definitely something I was wishing for during an incident earlier this week.

A minor note, if anyone from Grafana is around - a bunch of the links on the bottom of the announcement go to a 404.

motakuk5• 4 years ago

We're fixing that, thank you ;)

anyfactor• 4 years ago

Here is the repo: https://github.com/grafana/oncall

AGPL 3.0

pphysch9• 4 years ago

Seems like a solid replacement for Alertmanager for those already using Grafana OSS. Anyone planning on using both OnCall and Alertmanager?

dString• 4 years ago

Doesn't AlertManager evaluate metrics and fire alerts?

A quick look at OnCall suggests it is more for managing fired alerts than firing alerts.

Their own screenshot has AlertManager as an alert source.

pphysch9• 4 years ago

AlertManager does not do the evaluations, it does not connect to any metrics database; those are done by Prometheus/etc and forwarded to AlertManager, which handles deduplication and routing among other things.

remram• 4 years ago

Grafana used to be so simple, I don't know if I'm a fan of this direction towards many services.

Having to run alertmanager and configure it in addition to Grafana was bad enough, now you need to run and configure another service if you want some extra functionalities for those alerts? Are they going to keep maintaining acknowledgements and scheduled silence in AlertManager now that OnCall exists? Are we going to have "legacy notifications" in AlertManager when not running OnCall, the same way there are "legacy alerts" in Grafana when updating from Grafana 7 (pre-AlertManager)?

juliennakache• 4 years ago

Looking forward to trying this out. I've always felt that PagerDuty was absurdly expensive for the feature set they were offering. It costs something at least $250 per user for organization larger than 5 person - even if you're not an engineer who is ever directly on call. At my previous company, IT had to regularly send surveys to employees to assess if they really needed to have a PagerDuty account. Alerts are a key information in an organization that runs software in production and you shouldn't have to pay $250 / month just to be able to have some visibility into it. I'm hoping Grafana OnCall is able to fully replace PagerDuty.

CSMastermind• 4 years ago

I've always felt that PagerDuty was absurdly expensive for the feature set they were offering

For anyone out there in the same spot, I'll say that I switched my last company to Atlassian's OpsGenie and it was a 10x cost savings for the same feature set.

arccy• 4 years ago

the opsgenie api is really bad though if you want to manage it as code/declaratively

dijit5• 4 years ago

I really can’t find myself to ever recommend atlassian products though.

If cost is the only measure: I understand. But time lost in various areas of the software package (performance alone! Before we get into weird UX paradigms and esoteric query languages, shoddy search systems etc;) surely has an impact on cost. Having your employees spending a lot of time navigating janky software has a cost too.

SEJeff• 4 years ago

We did the same thing. We were fairly early and heavy users of the pagerduty API. We'd been using it for over a year and had integrated it fairly deeply into our SRE stack. When the renewal came up (we had a 3 year contract), they wanted to massively up the price due to our API usage. IIRC, it was more than 5x more. Our CTO had us port all of the tooling to opsgenie and we've never looked back.

I'm generally not a fan of Atlassian anything, but Opsgenie was really good before Atlassian purchased them and they're still really good.

twright0• 4 years ago

I made that leap too (moved from a company that used Pagerduty to a company that used Opsgenie) and it is the same feature set but not the same quality. Pagerduty in my experience is rock solid - I used it on various high-page-frequency rotations for something like seven straight years and literally never saw a dropped alert/notification once.

On the flip side in the 8ish months I used Opsgenie I saw a litany of issues, like the mobile app silently logging people out (and thus not delivering push notifications) and the app failing to send SMS notifications. We had pages get dropped by the primary because they never got a notification.

I want exactly one feature from my pager, delivering 100% of my pages. It's not a situation where I'm ok with 99% success rate, and that seemed to be the tradeoff and what you are paying for with Pagerduty.

jlg23• 4 years ago

Thanks, I think I finally understand why some friends of mine, who can implement this for any company in half a day, take $2000/day...

motakuk5• 4 years ago

Check this ;) https://github.com/grafana/oncall/tree/dev/tools/pagerduty-m...

pm90• 4 years ago

I knew Pagerduty was going down the toilet when their sales folks started aggressively pitching BS products nobody really needed before their IPO. They couldn’t even release a proper incident management tool.

I really hope this project gets good enough to ditch PD. PD should literally lay off most of its staff and just maintain the existing product, cut costs and focus mostly on integrations. There is no way they have any other future.

deathanatos• 4 years ago

I agree with the weird pushiness on other products that add specious business value, but I do think there is room for feature growth in the main product.

For example, the auto-merge functionality is somewhat useful, but it sometimes gets it wrong. Both merging and splitting alerts is extremely clunky. I'd also love to be able to have policies like "this alert is low-priority outside of business hours". The ability to re-open an accidentally closed alert. The ability to edit the alerting rules (the Global Ruleset) without needing to be a super-admin, as the Power That Be are reluctant to hand that out, also, the ability to just read the Global Ruleset with my peon privileges.

… the sort of spit & polish that doesn't happen, IMO, anymore, because everything is an MVP feature, before the agile scrum PM moves on to the next MVP feature. "Polish" just accumulates in the JIRA graveyard.

echelon• 4 years ago

Time and time again.

"Business should focus on its core competency"

* Outsource in-house infra to cloud. This begets lock-in as every engineer is doing heaven knows what with Lambda. Still need that huge infra team to manage AWS.

* Outsource in-house metrics and visibility to SignalFx, Splunk, DataDog, NewRelic, etc. Still need a team to manage it. Costs get raised by more than double because we're beholden, so now we need to fund 20+ engineer quarters to migrate everything ASAP.

* Feature flagging system built in house works like a charm and needs one engineer for maintenance. Let's fund a team to migrate it all to LaunchDarkly. Year+ later and we still don't have proper support or rollout and their stuff doesn't work as expected.

Madness.

Expensive madness.

SaaS won't magically reduce your staffing needs. Open source solutions won't reduce your staffing needs either, but they'll make costs predictable. As these tools become more prevalent and standard, you can even hire experts for them.

yashap• 4 years ago

Agreed. Cost really is the big selling point of Grafana Cloud - it’s far, far cheaper than most competitors, and good enough. Not as good as NewRelic, DataDog, etc., but you get good enough metrics, logs, alerts, distributed tracing, and now incident management, at an excellent price.

this_was_posted• 4 years ago

glad to hear this got open sourced!

for someone at grafana; noticed a dead link in the post: https://grafana.com/docs/oncall/main/

nojito3• 4 years ago

Unfortunate that it's AGPL. But this is looks really great!

ucosty4• 4 years ago

Why is that unfortunate? Unless you're looking to make proprietary changes to Grafana Oncall and host it as a SAAS, it's the same as running any other GPL software.

nojito3• 4 years ago

GPL and its variants are a no go where I work.

bbkane• 4 years ago

LinkedIn built and uses https://iris.claims/ . I don't know how it compares to alternatives, but I find IRIS relatively pretty easy to use.

josephcsible• 4 years ago

There's nothing unfortunate about the AGPLv3. Everything that it doesn't let you do is stuff that you shouldn't be doing anyway.

acatton• 4 years ago

https://drewdevault.com/2020/07/27/Anti-AGPL-propaganda.html

goodpoint2• 4 years ago

It's very nice to see Python and AGPL used for this.

ucosty4• 4 years ago

Looks very cool, will have to give this a shot.

motakuk5• 4 years ago

Hello HN!

Matvey Kukuy, ex-CEO of Amixr and a head of the OnCall project here. We've been working hard for a few months to make this OSS release happen. I believe it should make incident response features (on-call rotations, escalations, multi-channel notifications) and best practices more accessible to the wider audience of SRE and DevOps engineers.

Hope someone will be able to finally sleep well at night being sure that OnCall will handle escalations and will alert the right person :)

Please join our community on a GitHub! The whole Grafana OnCall team is help you and to make this thing better.

the_duke• 4 years ago

The docs link [1] is 404.

Seems like the /main is the culprit.

[1] https://grafana.com/docs/oncall/main/.

motakuk5• 4 years ago

Fixed: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/oncall/

knicholes• 4 years ago

Being on-call has never made me sleep better at night!

krab• 4 years ago

If I know someone else is on call and he's competent, I can sleep better.

Tao33002• 4 years ago

I've said it before, I'll say it again. I don't care if it's the Joint Chiefs and the whole United Nations calling me up to tell me an asteroid will destroy the planet unless I sign on [0]. If it's after hours, it'll have to wait until tomorrow, possibly Monday.

[0] Spoiler alert: it's not.

Tao33002• 4 years ago

it should make incident response features (on-call rotations, escalations, multi-channel notifications) and best practices more accessible to the wider audience

Is that a net positive?

Equiet• 4 years ago

It's surprising how seemingly difficult it is to build a good on-call scheduling system. Everything I tried so far (not naming the companies here) felt like the UX was the last thing on the developers' minds. Which is tolerable during business hours but really annoying at 2am.

Is there some hidden complexity or is it just a consequence of engineers building a product for other engineers? Also, any tips what worked for you?

matsemann4• 4 years ago

Have had lots of bad experiences with that from Pagerduty at least. Want to generate a schedule far in advance, so people know when they will be oncall and can plan/switch.

Of course, in a few months we may have some new people having joined, some quit, or other circumstances. A single misclick when fixing that can invalidate the whole schedule and generate another. Infuriating.

Or the UI itself, might have become better tha last two years, but having to click "next week" tens of times to see when I was scheduled (since I wasnt just interested in my next scheduled time but all of them) were annoying.

pphysch9• 4 years ago

A bit disappointed by the architecture -- it's a Django stack with MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, and Celery -- for what is effectively AlertManager (a single golang binary) with a nicer web frontend + Grafana integration + etc.

I'm curious why/if this architecture was chosen. I get that it started as a standalone product (Amixr), but in the current state it is hard to rationalize deploying this next to Grafana in my current containerless setting.

lazyant3• 4 years ago

Curious as to what architecture you would have preferred or why this pretty standard stack (that can be deployed to k8s) is not giving you.

chrisandchris• 4 years ago

Not OP, but one may interpret your response as "I don't understand why you prefer a single binary over this architecture that requires 6 different services and prefers k8s".

IMHO, OP just stated that one could solve this with less dependencies and have the same (if not a better) result.

theptip2• 4 years ago

For a simple low-scale app you can often do without Redis and Celery/RMQ if you just push everything into Postgres.

Far less scalable, but it is dramatically simpler to deploy. Often gets you surprisingly far though. Would be interesting to know how many monitored integrations could be supported by that flow.

gjulianm4• 4 years ago

Installation in a regular system without Kubernetes? Right now I can install Grafana, Prometheus and Alertmanager in a regular Linux system using distribution packages, and just worry about those programs themselves. If I want to install OnCall, I need not only OnCall plus four other non-trivial dependencies that will still need configuration, management and troubleshooting. All for something that is going to deal with far less load than any of Grafana/Prometheus/Alertmanager. I honestly do not understand it.

pphysch9• 4 years ago

Any of the following:

Python(Django)+Redis+[SQLite]

Python(Django)+Postgres

[Compiled Go binary]+[SQLite]

SQLite barely even counts as an architectural dependency TBH :)

vhold• 4 years ago

AlertManager is one component of a more complicated infrastructure.

https://prometheus.io/docs/introduction/overview/#architectu...

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/overview/components/

pphysch9• 4 years ago

OnCall also does nothing unless you have something external firing alerts for you. They both fill similar niches in a larger monitoring system; this does not excuse OnCall having a drastically more complex internal architecture.

Too• 4 years ago

That picture shows the complete monitoring stack with lots of optional components (pushgw, service discovery, Grafana).

When comparing to OnCall you need OnCall AND still the rest of that Prometheus picture.

Compare with this picture where everything in the leftmost Alert Detection box is what you see in the Prometheus architecture. https://grafana.com/docs/oncall/latest/getting-started/

skullone2• 4 years ago

That seems like a perfectly reasonable architecture. If only all of us could work on battle tested components like those during our job!

contravariant• 4 years ago

For something that is supposed to add some more features to the basic email/HTTP message alert like grafana generates, I do wonder what extra features require an additional 2 databases, a message queue and a separate task queue.

MarquesMa• 4 years ago

This. I find open source projects written in Go or Rust are usually more pleasant to work with than Java, Django or Rails, etc. They have less clunky dependencies, are less resource-hungry, and can ship with single executables which make people's life much easier.

Just think about Gitea vs GitLab.

matsemann4• 4 years ago

Not sure why you include java in that, as you mostly get a standalone file. No such thing as a jre in modern java deployment.

As for python, at least getting a dockerfile helps a lot. Otherwise it's a huge mess to get running, yes.

Python is still a hassle anyways, since the lack of true multithreading means that you often need multiple deployments, which the Celery usage here for instance shows.

eeZah7Ux3• 4 years ago

Hell no, I want stuff like OnCall packaged into Linux distribution. I need something stable and reliable and that receive security fixes.

Maintaining tenths of binaries pulled from random github projects over the years is a nightmare.

(Not to mention all the issues around supply chain management, licensing issues, homecalling and so on)

motakuk5• 4 years ago

I agree that multi-component architecture is harder to deploy. We did our best and prepared tooling to make deployment an easy thing.

Helm (https://github.com/grafana/oncall/tree/dev/helm/oncall), docker-composes for hobby and dev environments.

Besides deployment, there are two main priorities for OnCall architecture: 1) It should be as "default" as possible. No fancy tech, no hacking around 2) It should deliver notifications no matter what.

We chose the most "boring" (no offense Django community, that's a great quality for a framework) stack we know well: Django, Rabbit, Celery, MySQL, Redis. It's mature, reliable, and allows us to build a message bus-based pipeline with reliable and predictable migrations.

It's important for such a tool to be based on message bus because it should have no single point of failure. If worker will die, the other will pick up the task and deliver alert. If Slack will go down, you won't loose your data. It will continue delivering to other destinations and will deliver to Slack once it's up.

The architecture you see in the repo was live for 3+ years now. We were able to perform a few hundreds of data migrations without downtimes, had no major downtimes or data loss. So I'm pretty happy with this choice.

Deritio2• 4 years ago

Hearing your message bus assumption sounds like one of the most ridiculous claims I heard.

Sorry but why is rabbitmq really necessary?

gen220• 4 years ago

I think your decisions were reasonable, as is the opinion of the person you're responding to.

To be fair, even in its current form, it should be possible to operate this system with sqlite (i.e. no db server) and in-process celery workers (i.e. no rabbit MQ) if configured correctly, assuming they're not using MySQL-specific features in the app.

Using a message bus, a persistent data store behind a SQL interface, and a caching layer are all good design choices. I think the OP's concern is less with your particular implementations, and more with the principle of preventing operators from bringing their own preferred implementation of those interfaces to the table.

They mentioned that it makes sense because you were a standalone product, so stack portability was less of a concern. But as FOSS, you're opening yourself up to different standards on portability.

It requires some work on the maintainer to make the application tolerant to different fulfillments of the same interfaces. But it's good work. It usually results in cleaner separation of concerns between application logic and caching/message bus/persistence logic, for one. It also allows your app to serve a wider audience: for example, those who are locked-in to using Postgres/Kafka/Memcached.

slotrans3• 4 years ago

You don't need Rabbit, Celery, or Redis. You should be able to replace MySQL with SQLite. Then it would be radically easier to deploy.

raffraffraff2• 4 years ago

Nothing wrong with that. I managed 7+ Sensu "clusters" at a previous job, and it's stack was a ruby server, Redis and RabbitMQ. But I completely ditched RabbitMQ and used Redis for the queue and data. Simpler, more performant and more reliable (even if the feature was marked experimental). Our alerts were really spammy, and we had ~8k servers (each running a bunch of containers) per cluster, so these things were busy. Each cluster was 3x small nodes (6gb memory, 2CPU) Memory usage was miniscule, typically <300mb. Any box could be restarted without any impact because Redis just operated in (failover) mode and Sensu was horizontally scalable.

I get why you would add a relational DB to the mix. Personally, I'd like a Rabbit-free option.

minusf2• 4 years ago

not gonna argue that a single binary is the ultimate deploy solution but running a django app is not that difficult (although i am biased cause i do that for a living).

i love django projects but mysql, celery and rabbitmq -- no thanks.

pphysch9• 4 years ago

Don't get me wrong, I love Django and think its a great framework for writing internal tools like this. Redis gets a pass too since Django has native support for it in 4.0+. It's really the (IMHO unnecessary) combo of MySQL+RabbitMQ+Celery that turns me off.

Redis itself has had solid support for building reliable distributed task streaming for nearly 4 years (Redis ConsumerGroups introduced in 2018).

mkl95• 4 years ago

Django stack with MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, and Celery

MySQL is a weird if not slightly disturbing choice. Other than that it's a boring, battle-tested stack that is relatively easy to scale. I agree that Go is nicer, but I'm biased by several years of dealing with horrific Flask / Django projects.

airstrike• 4 years ago

several years of dealing with horrific Flask / Django projects.

I think you misspelled "beautiful"

goodpoint2• 4 years ago

That's very bad. 99% of organizations don't have a volume of alerts that justifies any of MySQL, Redis and RabbitMQ.

Complexity comes at a steep price when something critical (e.g. OnCall) breaks and you have to debug it in a hurry.

Shoving everything in a container and closing the lid does not help.

alex_dev• 4 years ago

One of the most frustrating aspects of being a software engineer is dealing with others that love to over-engineer. Unfortunately, they make enough noise that complex solutions are necessary that it gets managers scared about taking any easier, simpler solutions.

heavyset_go2• 4 years ago

That's a tried and true stack, and a very good one for maintaining sane levels of reliability, consistency, durability etc. Resource wise, at least with Celery, RabbitMQ and Django, they're also pretty lean.

It even ships in containers along with Docker Compose files and Helm charts, which would suit the deployment use cases of 99% of users. I understand that you're not using containers, but I don't think that's a limitation that many are inflicting upon themselves as of late, and if pressed, installing Docker Compose takes about 5 minutes and you don't have to think about it again.

pphysch9• 4 years ago

Docker Compose takes about 5 minutes and you don't have to think about it again

Except when you need to pin and repin versions to comply with a security policy, which may be why you aren't even running containers in the first place

sandstrom2• 4 years ago

I think it would be great if it was easier to mix and match Grafana SaaS and self-hosted products.

For example, we need to run Loki ourselves, for security / privacy reasons, but wouldn't mind using hosted versions of Tempo, Prometheus and OnCall.

Right now it isn't super-easy to link e.g. self-hosted loki search queries with SaaS-Prometheus.

netingle• 4 years ago

Its very much our aim to make this mix of self-hosted and cloud services as easy as going all-cloud; but I agree we're not quite there yet.

Do you mind if I ask what isn't super-easy about linking self-hosted loki search queries with SaaS-Prometheus? You should be e.g. able to add a Prometheus data source to your local Grafana (or securely expose your Loki to the internet and add a Loki data source to your Cloud Grafana)

sandstrom2• 4 years ago

Honestly I haven't tried that much, but didn't find anything in the docs so I assumed it wasn't a prioritized area.

In our particular scenario, we'd probably want to run Loki + Grafana locally, and then hosted Prometheus + hosted Grafana for metrics.

But would be great if we could just tell the two about each other, and under which domains they exist. That way, Prometheus-grafana could construct URLs that linked straight into Loki-grafana (that we host) for e.g. the same interval, or the same label filter (GET params).

But it would only work if I (the end-user) had access to both. That way, we don't have to expose Loki to the internet. But linking would still work.

There are quite a lot of services that does this with Github and commits. You can link from e.g. Bugsnag to Github by only telling Bugsnag your org and repo names. But Bugsnag won't have read access to Github (they also have another integration method which does require access, but that's not the one I'm talking about here).

Those types of "linking into a known URL pattern of another service" integrations are easy to setup and very easy to secure.

ildari• 4 years ago

Hey HN, Ildar here, one of the co-founders of Amixr and one of the software engineers behind Grafana OnCall. Finally we open-sourced the product I'm really excited about that. Please try it out and leave your feedback

pachico2• 4 years ago

I love Grafana, don't get me wrong, but I have the sensation they are now in that position where, companies that got a massive capital injection and, therefore, a massive increase of work power, release too much and too soon.

It doesn't have anything to do, of course, with the fact that this morning we suddenly found that all our dashboards stopped working because we were upgraded to Grafana v9, for which there is not a stable release nor documentation for breaking changes.

Luckily they rolled back our account.

danlimerick• 4 years ago

I apologize for the disruption we caused you when rolling out Grafana 9. We are working on improving our releases to Grafana Cloud and also on making sure that errors due to breaking changes in a major release won't affect customers in the future. As a Grafana Cloud customer, you shouldn't need to read docs about breaking changes when we upgrade your instance.

pachico2• 4 years ago

Dude, I hope you also read when I say that I love what you do and your reply just confirms I'm putting my money in the right hands.

I just wouldn't mind to be the last to upgrade to a newer version :)

Deritio2• 4 years ago

I like what grafana labs does with grafana.

Im annoyed by their license choice.

But apparently when you are grafana everything looks like a dashboard UI?

Joke aside I will have a look but I didn't like the screenshots before already. I like the dashboardy thing for dashboards but otherwise it's not a really good UI system for everything else.

greatgib• 4 years ago

I would give a huge marketing bullshit award for the following sentence:

<<We offered Grafana OnCall to users as a SaaS tool first for a few reasons. It’s a commonly shared belief that the more independent your on-call management system is, the better it will be for your entire operation. If something goes wrong, there will be a “designated survivor” outside of your infrastructure to help identify any issues. >>

They tried to ensure that you use their SaaS offering because they care more about your own good than yourself. So humanist...

ezrast• 4 years ago

The point isn't that their infrastructure is more reliable than yours, but that it's decoupled from yours. If you run your monitoring on the same infra as production, it's liable to go down when production does, i.e. just when you need it most. This is a real reason to outsource monitoring to a SaaS, just like there are real reasons to self-host.

I mean, obviously they chose to address the segment of the market they could get more money out of first; I'm not contesting that. But the bit you quoted is low-grade bullshit at best. Hardly award-winning.

Maledictus• 4 years ago

What I really want is an Android app that keeps alerting until a page is ACKed or escalated.

machinerychorus• 4 years ago

check out pushover, I use it for this exact case

https://pushover.net/

ndom91• 4 years ago

OpsGenie's Android app does this. Wouldn't be surprised if OnCall has this as well (or is coming soon).

raffraffraff2• 4 years ago

Production helm chart link on this page leads to 404: https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/oncall/open-source/#p...

googletron• 4 years ago

Very cool. I love what the Grafana team is up to.

JimXugle• 4 years ago

Another similar tool I've used in the past is GoAlert.

https://goalert.me/

NonNefarious• 4 years ago

The title is missing critical info: What the hell is it?

Of course the article isn't much better. It reads like a joke, the joke being that "on-call management" doesn't mean anything.

Grafana releases OnCall open source project

Related Stories