Grafana alerts

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 12:26:57 +0000

Overview of Grafana alerting

Grafana 8.0 has new and improved alerting that centralizes alerting information in a single, searchable view. It is enabled by default for all new OSS instances, and is an opt-in feature for older installations that still use legacy dashboard alerting. We encourage you to create issues in the Grafana GitHub repository for bugs found while testing Grafana alerting. See also, What’s New with Grafana alerting.

When Grafana alerting is enabled, you can:

Before you begin using Grafana alerting, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with some basic concepts of Grafana alerting.

Limitations

The Grafana alerting system can retrieve rules from all available Prometheus, Loki, and Alertmanager data sources. It might not be able to fetch rules from other supported data sources.
We aim to support the latest two minor versions of both Prometheus and Alertmanager. We cannot guarantee that older versions will work. As an example, if the current Prometheus version is 2.31.1, we support >= 2.29.0.

Legacy Grafana Alerts

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 12:26:57 +0000

Legacy Grafana alerts

Grafana alerting is enabled by default for new OSS installations. For older installations, it is still an opt-in feature.

Note: Legacy dashboard alerts are deprecated and will be removed in Grafana 9. We encourage you to migrate to Grafana alerting for all existing installations.

Legacy dashboard alerts have two main components:

Alert rule - When the alert is triggered. Alert rules are defined by one or more conditions that are regularly evaluated by Grafana.
Notification channel - How the alert is delivered. When the conditions of an alert rule are met, the Grafana notifies the channels configured for that alert.

Alert tasks

You can perform the following tasks for alerts:

Clustering

The current alerting system doesn’t support high availability. Alert notifications are not deduplicated and load balancing is not supported between instances; for example, silences from one instance will not appear in the other.

Alert evaluation

Grafana managed alerts are evaluated by the Grafana backend. Rule evaluations are scheduled, according to the alert rule configuration, and queries are evaluated by an engine that is part of core Grafana.

Alerting rules can only query backend data sources with alerting enabled:

builtin or developed and maintained by grafana: Graphite, Prometheus, Loki, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, Google Cloud Monitoring, Cloudwatch, Azure Monitor, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, OpenTSDB, Oracle, and Azure Data Explorer
any community backend data sources with alerting enabled (backend and alerting properties are set in the plugin.json)

Metrics from the alerting engine

The alerting engine publishes some internal metrics about itself. You can read more about how Grafana publishes internal metrics. See also, View alert rules and their current state.

Metric Name	Type	Description
`alerting.alerts`	gauge	How many alerts by state
`alerting.request_duration_seconds`	histogram	Histogram of requests to the Alerting API
`alerting.active_configurations`	gauge	The number of active, non default alertmanager configurations for grafana managed alerts
`alerting.rule_evaluations_total`	counter	The total number of rule evaluations
`alerting.rule_evaluation_failures_total`	counter	The total number of rule evaluation failures
`alerting.rule_evaluation_duration_seconds`	summary	The duration for a rule to execute
`alerting.rule_group_rules`	gauge	The number of rules

Alerts on Grafana Labs