Grafana Alerting on Grafana Labs

Introduction to Grafana Alerting

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Introduction to Grafana Alerting

Grafana Alerting lets you define alert rules across multiple data sources and manage notifications with flexible routing.

Built on the Prometheus alerting model, it integrates with the Grafana stack to provide a scalable and effective alerting setup across a wide range of environments.

Tip
For a hands-on introduction, refer to Getting started with Grafana Alerting tutorials.

How it works at a glance

Grafana Alerting periodically evaluates alert rules by executing their data source queries and checking their conditions.
Each alert rule can produce multiple alert instances—one per time series or dimension.
If a condition is breached, an alert instance fires.
Firing (and resolved) alert instances are sent for notifications, either directly to a contact point or through notification policies for more flexibility.

Fundamentals

The following concepts are key to your understanding of how Grafana Alerting works.

Alert rules

An alert rule consists of one or more queries and expressions that select the data you want to measure. It also contains a condition, which is the threshold that an alert rule must meet or exceed to fire.

In the alert rule, choose the contact point or notification policies to determine how to receive the alert notifications.

Alert rule evaluation

Alert rules are frequently evaluated and the state of their alert instances is updated accordingly. Only alert instances that are in a firing or resolved state are sent in notifications.

Alert instances

Each alert rule can produce multiple alert instances (also known as alerts) - one alert instance for each time series or dimension. This allows you to observe multiple resources in a single expression.

sum by(cpu) (
  rate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode!="idle"}[1m])
)

A rule using the PromQL expression above creates as many alert instances as the amount of CPUs after the first evaluation, enabling a single rule to report the status of each CPU.

For a demo, see the multi-dimensional alerts example.

Contact points

Contact points determine the notification message and where notifications are sent. For example, you might have a contact point that sends notifications to an email address, to Slack, to an incident management system (IRM) such as Grafana IRM or PagerDuty, or to a webhook.

Notification messages

By default, notification messages include alert details, such as the number of alerts, their status, and annotations to help responders address alert issues. Notification messages can also be customized.

In the alert rule, you can choose a contact point to receive the alert notifications or use notification policies instead.

Notification policies

Notification policies are an advanced option for handling alert notifications by distinct scopes, such as by team or service—ideal for managing large alerting systems.

Notification policies routes alerts to contact points via label matching. They are defined in a tree structure, where the root of the notification policy tree is the Default notification policy, which ensures all alert instances are handled.

Each notification policy decides where to send the alert (contact point) and when to send the notification (timing options).

Notification grouping

To reduce alert noise, Grafana Alerting groups related firing alerts into a single notification by default. You can customize this behavior in the alert rule or notification policy settings.

Silences and mute timings

Silences and mute timings allow you to pause notifications without interrupting alert rule evaluation. Use a silence to pause notifications on a one-time basis, such as during a maintenance window; and use mute timings to pause notifications at regular intervals, such as evenings and weekends.

Configure alert rules

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Configure alert rules

Alert rules are the central component of your alerting system.

An alert rule consists of one or more queries and expressions that select the data you want to measure. It contains a condition to trigger the alert, an evaluation period that determines how often the rule is evaluated, and additional options to manage alert events and their notifications.

Grafana supports two types of alert rules:

Grafana-managed alert rules — the recommended option. They can query backend data sources—including Prometheus-based ones—and offer a richer feature set.
Data source-managed alert rules — supported for Prometheus-based data sources (such as Mimir, Loki, and Prometheus), with rules stored in the data source itself.

You can convert and import data source-managed rules into Grafana-managed rules to let Grafana Alerting manage them.

Both types of alert rules can be configured in Grafana using the + New alert rule flow. For step-by-step instructions, refer to:

In Grafana Alerting, you can also configure recording rules, which pre-compute queries and save the results as new time series metrics for use in other alert rules or dashboard queries.

Configure notifications

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Configure notifications

Configuring how, when, and where to send alert notifications is an essential part of your alerting system.

By default, Grafana Alerting provides default notification messages with relevant alert information, so you don’t need to configure messages initially. In the alert rule, you need to configure how to forward alerts:

Directly to a contact point.
To a contact point via notification policies (more flexible).

Notification setup is essential for an effective alerting system to scale across multiple teams and services. For a quick overview about the various components involved in handling notifications, refer to the introduction about notifications.

The topics in this section include step-by-step instructions for:

Configuring contact points to specify where to receive alert notifications.
Configuring notification policies to determine how alerts are routed to contact points.
Templating notifications to customize notification messages.
Configuring silences or mute timings to stop notifications.

Alertmanager architecture

Grafana Alerting is based on the Prometheus Alerting model, whose architecture decouples rule evaluation from notification handling.

The alert rule evaluator, either Grafana or the data source, evaluates alert rules and triggers alerts.
The alert notification manager, known as the Alertmanager, receives alerts and manages their notifications.

In Grafana, you can use different types of alert rules and configure multiple Alertmanagers.

By default, Grafana uses its built-in Alertmanager, and Grafana Cloud instances include an additional Alertmanager.

When having multiple Alertmanagers, note that each Alertmanager manages its own independent notification resources, such as contact points, templates, policies, silences, mute timings, active time intervals, and active notifications.

These notification resources cannot be shared across different Alertmanagers.

Use the Choose Alertmanager dropdown to select the Alertmanager you want to configure.

Monitor alerts

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Monitor alerts

Alerts and alert notifications should provide key information to help alert responders and incident participants understand what happened in their system and how to respond.

Grafana Alerting offers the ability to monitor your alerts and manage your alerting setup. You can get an overview of your alerts, track the history of alert states, and monitor notification statuses. These can help you start investigating alert issues within Grafana and improve the reliability of your alerting implementation.

The previous sections explain how to configure alert rules and configure notifications to generate alerts and send their notifications.

This section focuses on finding and understanding the state of your alert rules, alert instances, and their notifications. For more details, refer to:

Additional configuration

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Additional configuration

Grafana Alerting offers a variety of advanced configuration options to further tailor your alerting setup. These optional features include configuring up permissions and role-based access control, adding external Alertmanagers, or defining your alerting setup as code. While not essential for basic alerting, these options can enhance security, scalability, and automation in complex environments.

The following topics provide you with advanced configuration options for Grafana Alerting.

Guides

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Guides

Guides in the Grafana Alerting documentation provide best practices and practical recommendations to help you move from a basic alerting setup to real-world use cases.

These guides cover topics such as:

For more hands-on examples, refer to Examples and Tutorials.

Examples

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Examples

This section provides practical examples that show how to work with different types of alerting data, apply alert design patterns, reuse alert logic, and take advantage of specific Grafana Alerting features.

This section includes: