Never miss a critical Grafana alert again (even at 3 a.m.)

If you’ve ever woken up to a wall of red dashboards and thought, “I wish someone had called me,” this guide is for you. Email and chat are great—but for truly critical incidents, a voice call cuts through the noise. With Echobell, you can turn Grafana alerts into instant phone call notifications, complete with escalation and quiet hours.

This walkthrough shows how to connect Grafana to Echobell using a simple webhook, plus a few tips to keep your on‑call sane.

Why Echobell phone call notifications for Grafana?

• Immediate attention: calls are hard to ignore when minutes matter
• Built for on‑call: escalation, retries, and quiet hours keep noise under control
• Team‑friendly: share channels with teammates and rotate ownership
• Simple setup: works over a secure Echobell webhook in minutes

Related docs if you want to skim first:

• What is Echobell? → /docs/what-is-echobell
• Notifications model (priorities, retries) → /docs/notification
• Webhooks overview → /docs/webhook
• Grafana developer guide → /docs/developer/grafana

Connect Echobell to Grafana in 3 minutes

Prerequisites

1. Echobell account with an active channel and webhook URL (see /docs/webhook)
2. Admin access to your Grafana instance
3. At least one alert rule configured

Step 1 — Create a Webhook contact point in Grafana

• In Grafana, go to Alerting → Contact points
• New contact point → choose “Webhook”
• Name it “Echobell Phone Calls” (or your team name)

Step 2 — Add your Echobell webhook URL

Set the URL to your channel’s webhook, for example:

https://hook.echobell.one/t/xxxxxxxx

You can copy this from your channel settings in Echobell (details in /docs/webhook). Treat it like a secret and rotate it if leaked.

Step 3 — Test the integration

• Click “Test” in Grafana to send a sample alert
• You should get an Echobell phone call within seconds

Step 4 — Attach to your notification policies

• Go to Alerting → Notification policies
• Create or edit a policy that applies to your critical alerts
• Add your “Echobell Phone Calls” contact point

That’s it—Grafana will call you via Echobell when the policy matches.

Best practices for on‑call sanity

• Use phone calls for high‑priority alerts only; keep lower severities to chat/email
• In Echobell, set retries and timeouts to avoid alert fatigue (see /docs/notification)
• Configure escalation to teammates if the first call isn’t answered
• Set quiet hours to prevent non‑urgent wake‑ups
• Keep the on‑call roster current and shared inside Echobell

Advanced: tailoring the call experience

Echobell lets you fine‑tune how calls behave:

• Share the channel with your team for broader coverage
• Configure retry attempts and escalation paths
• Customize voice content per alert type using templates
• Set quiet hours and backup contacts for resilience

See the full Grafana integration guide here: /docs/developer/grafana

Troubleshooting and common pitfalls

• No call received: confirm the policy actually routes to your Echobell contact point
• 4xx on webhook: verify the exact Echobell webhook URL and that the channel is active
• Too many calls: narrow the policy scope or lower the alert’s severity
• Too few calls: raise severity or add label/rule filters to make sure critical alerts match

Related reading

• How to send webhook alerts to Echobell (great for custom systems): /blog/get-notified-with-webhook-mcp
• GitHub Actions failures, instantly on your phone: /blog/github-actions-notifications
• Developer docs for Grafana: /docs/developer/grafana

Wrap‑up

Phone call notifications add a reliable, human layer to your Grafana alerting. With Echobell’s webhook integration, you can make sure the right person gets a timely call—and your incident response gets faster and calmer.

Take five minutes to wire it up today and sleep a little better tonight.