Inside Prezi's cost-saving switch to Grafana Alerting, Grafana OnCall, and Grafana Incident from PagerDuty

Prezi, a video and visual communications company, undertook a strategic shift to Grafana's Incident Response & Management (IRM) suite, replacing their long-used PagerDuty system to enhance efficiency and reduce costs. The transition, driven by the integration of Grafana Cloud for log management, led to the adoption of Grafana Alerting, Grafana OnCall, and Grafana Incident, offering a seamless workflow and cost-effectiveness. The Prezi Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team conducted a detailed comparison between the two platforms, focusing on essential features such as alert collection and escalation, and found that while both systems offered similar functionalities, Grafana IRM presented significant annual savings. The migration process involved a lift-and-shift approach, with existing configurations duplicated for IRM, enabling a swift transition without disrupting ongoing operations. Despite encountering challenges such as unused configurations and limitations with the Terraform provider, the Prezi team successfully integrated IRM into their infrastructure, marking the switch as a successful cost-saving alternative to PagerDuty.