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

Phone and SMS notifications

Grafana IRM supports 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 notification methods, especially for critical alerts.

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, starting with + followed by your country code and your local number. No spaces, parentheses, or dashes.
4. Click Send verification code and enter the code received via SMS

To learn more about the required phone number format, refer to the Phone verification format section of this document.

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

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 (DnD)

Syncing the IRM contact does not 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.

Understand phone and SMS notifications

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.

Additional information

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

Phone verification 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

Examples

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

Supported countries

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

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