How the Grafana Alerting team scales their issue management with GitHub Projects

Grafana Labs, a leading open-source platform for monitoring and observability, uses GitHub Projects to efficiently manage tasks and track progress across its teams, including backend, front-end, UX, and documentation. By employing task lists and a set of common labels, the Grafana Labs Alerting team can filter tasks, create multiple project views to meet diverse stakeholder needs, and utilize automation to maintain focus on coding. Custom fields in GitHub Projects allow for tailored views that distinguish between smaller tasks, quarterly goals, and escalations, enhancing both visibility and workflow management. The integration of GitHub Actions automates task labeling and notification processes, prioritizing escalations and reducing the average number of open issues. This streamlined approach has significantly improved productivity, allowing Grafana Labs to adapt GitHub Projects to suit the evolving needs of its growing teams, including the creation of a specialized project for the SLO team. The use of GitHub Projects has proven to be a flexible and effective planning and tracking solution, enabling engineers to concentrate on code while providing managers with the necessary oversight to plan team efforts efficiently.