Documentation Grafana Cloud Alerts and IRM IRM Manage Notifications Phone and SMS

Phone and SMS notifications

Set up phone calls and SMS notifications in Grafana IRM to receive notifications about alert groups and incidents. While the Grafana IRM mobile app with push notifications is the recommended primary notification method, phone calls and SMS serve as valuable backup options, especially for critical alerts.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have the following:

• A Grafana Cloud account with access to Grafana IRM
• A phone number that can receive SMS messages for verification
• Access to your Grafana Cloud profile settings

Verify your phone number

You must verify your phone number with Grafana IRM before you can add phone or SMS to your notification rules.

Follow these steps to verify your phone number:

1. Navigate to the IRM tab of your Grafana Cloud Profile
2. Select Phone verification
3. Enter your phone number in E.164 format (see Phone number format below)
4. Click Send verification code and enter the code received via SMS

Phone number format

To verify your phone number in Grafana IRM, you must enter it using E.164 format, an international standard for phone numbers. If your number isn’t formatted correctly, IRM can’t send you a verification code.

E.164 format uses the following structure:

• Start with a plus sign (+)
• Follow with your country calling code
• Then your area code and local number, with no spaces, parentheses, or dashes

Format examples

Add phone notifications to your notification rules

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

For more information about configuring notification rules, refer to Configure notification rules.

Sync IRM phone numbers to your contacts

With the Grafana IRM mobile app, you can sync the phone numbers used by Grafana IRM to your mobile device’s contacts. This makes it easier to recognize IRM calls and optionally allow them to override Do Not Disturb (DnD) or silent mode.

When enabled, this setting creates a contact named Grafana IRM that includes all known phone numbers used by IRM to send SMS or make phone calls. The contact is managed by the mobile app and automatically updated with any IRM numbers when the app is opened.

Allow IRM contact to override Do Not Disturb

Syncing the IRM contact doesn’t automatically override DnD. To make sure IRM calls or messages come through during urgent situations, manually configure your device settings.

iOS: Enable Emergency Bypass

1. Open your Contacts and find the Grafana IRM contact
2. Tap Edit in the top-right corner
3. Tap Ringtone or Text Tone
4. Enable Emergency Bypass
5. Tap Done

This allows calls and messages from Grafana IRM to ring even when your device is in silent mode or DnD is active.

Android

The process for overriding DnD on Android varies by manufacturer and version. Refer to your device settings to configure exceptions for the Grafana IRM contact.

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 you need to be notified about 5 alert groups from 2 different integrations (3 from “Grafana Alerting” and 2 from “Health Check”), you receive:

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

The bundled SMS appears as:

text Copy

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

Supported countries and limitations

Grafana IRM supports phone calls and SMS to most countries worldwide through our service provider, Twilio. However, there are important considerations regarding availability and reliability.

Phone call support

Phone calls are supported for all available countries, provided that they are not restricted by the service provider.

Twilio may block phone calls to countries or phone numbers that they deem high-risk. Twilio determines country and phone number risk levels based on various factors, including:

• Historical fraud patterns in specific regions
• Unusual calling patterns or volumes
• Reports of fraudulent activity associated with specific numbers

If you experience issues receiving phone call notifications, complete the following steps:

1. Test your phone notification setup during non-critical times
2. Verify your phone number is correctly formatted (see Phone number format)
3. Us the Grafana IRM mobile app as your primary notification method
4. Contact support if you consistently can’t receive calls to a verified number

SMS support

IRM supports SMS notifications to all countries by default, except for the following regions that aren’t supported by our service provider, Twilio:

• Crimea (+7978)
• Cuba (+53)
• Iran (+98)
• North Korea (+850)
• Syria (+963)

If your phone number is in one of these regions, you can’t receive SMS notifications from Grafana IRM.

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 or calls in case of abnormal volume

Additional resources

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:

• Live call routing documentation
• SMS and call routing blog post