Grafana OnCall OSS Archive Deadline on March 24, — when and how should I migrate?

Teams still relying on Grafana OnCall OSS need a migration decision before the OSS archive and Grafana Cloud Connection shutdown on March 24, 2026.

Migrate to Grafana Cloud IRM unless SaaS is off-limits; only keep OnCall OSS if you can replace Cloud Connection dependencies immediately.

Blockers

Who this is for

Candidates

Migrate to Grafana Cloud IRM

As of 2026-03-19, Grafana's official docs state that Grafana OnCall OSS will be archived on 2026-03-24 and that Cloud Connection support for SMS, phone, and mobile push notifications ends the same day. Grafana positions Grafana Cloud IRM as the managed replacement and provides an official migration path from OnCall OSS. Grafana Cloud IRM pricing, as of 2026-03-19, is a free tier with 3 active IRM users per month, and a Pro tier at "$20 / active IRM user" with a "$19 per month" platform fee that includes 3 active IRM users. It is the only option here with a verified first-party migration guide from Grafana.

When to choose

Best for "low-ops" plus "cost-sensitive" teams already invested in Grafana and willing to accept SaaS. Choose this when the decisive factor is keeping built-in SMS, voice, and mobile push notifications with the least migration ambiguity before 2026-03-24.

Tradeoffs

Fastest supported path and ongoing product development, but it moves you to a managed Grafana service with active-user pricing instead of self-hosted control.

Cautions

Grafana's migration guide requires a Grafana Cloud account, admin access to the OSS instance, and API tokens for both source and destination. Teams and users may need to be recreated manually or provisioned through SCIM or Team Sync. Grafana also states that the Grafana Cloud Migration Assistant does not migrate OnCall or IRM resources.

Sources

Keep Grafana OnCall OSS and replace Cloud Connection dependencies

As of 2026-03-19, Grafana's official docs say existing Grafana OnCall OSS deployments continue to function in your own environment, but the project is already in maintenance mode and will be archived on 2026-03-24. Grafana states there will be no further feature development, with fixes limited to critical bugs and valid CVEs with a CVSS score of 7.0 or higher. Cloud Connection-backed mobile push, SMS, and phone notifications stop being supported on 2026-03-24. Grafana's documentation points OSS users to self-managed alternatives such as Twilio, Exotel, Zvonok, webhooks, Pushover, Gotify, and ntfy.

When to choose

Best for "compliance" or self-hosted environments where moving incident routing into vendor SaaS is not acceptable. Choose this when the decisive factor is keeping control of the runtime and you can absorb the operational work of replacing notification plumbing immediately.

Tradeoffs

Preserves self-hosting and avoids an immediate platform migration, but leaves you on a frozen project with no feature roadmap and more operator burden.

Cautions

Grafana says the GitHub repository is read-only, no new features will be developed, and Cloud Connection-dependent notification paths end on 2026-03-24. Mobile push through the Grafana IRM mobile app will no longer work for OSS after that date, so you must validate replacement notification paths before the cutoff.

Sources

Migrate to PagerDuty

As of 2026-03-19, PagerDuty's official pricing page presents it as a managed incident platform with a free tier for up to 5 users and paid Incident Management plans that expand phone/SMS notifications, schedules, escalation policies, and incident workflow features. This is a clean strategic break from Grafana for teams that want a dedicated on-call SaaS. No verified first-party Grafana-to-PagerDuty migration guide was found in the sources reviewed here.

When to choose

Best for teams that want a dedicated incident SaaS and are willing to accept a fuller reimplementation outside the Grafana stack. Choose this when the decisive factor is reducing future dependency on Grafana's IRM roadmap rather than preserving in-stack integration.

Tradeoffs

Potentially stronger dedicated incident-management focus, but likely more migration work and less native alignment with existing Grafana dashboards, alerting, and access patterns.

Cautions

The official Grafana migration documentation retrieved here is specifically for Grafana Cloud IRM, not PagerDuty. Before committing, verify export and import coverage for schedules, escalation chains, integrations, and user provisioning in your own evaluation.

Sources

Facts updated: 2026-03-19
Published: 2026-04-03

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