Grafana Labs, a leading provider of observability solutions, has announced significant enhancements to its Incident Response and Management (IRM) platform. These changes help teams manage and respond to incidents more effectively by streamlining incident management processes and reducing response times.
Sift Investigations is one of the key new features of Grafana Incident. This tool helps engineers focus their time on fixing problems by removing the toil involved in an incident. Sift assists teams in rapidly filtering through data to identify and prioritize issues in real time. By quickly isolating error patterns or Kubernetes container failures, Sift enables teams to initiate remediation efforts promptly, thus minimizing the time to restore service. Grafana Machine Learning powers sift.
In addition to Sift investigations, Grafana Labs has integrated Grafana Incident with Grafana OnCall to streamline incident collaboration. This integration ensures that relevant team members are automatically notified based on availability and preferred contact methods. Grafana Labs aims to expedite the resolution process for critical issues by swiftly bringing the right personnel into the loop.
Further improvements include using OpenAI to generate concise incident summaries automatically, and "Slack Attachment Uploads" allows engineers to send files pertinent to an investigation to Slack rapidly by using emoji reactions. Also, incidents can now be declared directly from within Grafana OnCall or from any Grafana panel.
The announcement goes on to provide some detail on several incident management roadmap items currently in development. These include the introduction of private incidents for handling sensitive data securely, customizable incident phases to align with specific operational procedures, and the integration of Grafana OnCall and Grafana Incident into a single Slack app for enhanced user experience.
Other upcoming features include "Flow Labels" to ensure that all relevant data is carried over when an alert is escalated to become an incident. Also, the ability to automatically declare incidents as they progress through the on-call chain, and the expansion of incident management capabilities in the Grafana IRM mobile app are being worked on. This will enable responders to manage incidents directly from their mobile devices.
Grafana Labs encourages teams to explore these new features and integrate them into their incident management strategies.