Creating alerts

This documentation topic discusses legacy alerting in Grafana. This will not be supported in future versions of Amazon Managed Grafana. You can migrate to Grafana alerting to use the latest alerting features. For more information, see one of the following topics.

For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 10.x, see Alerts in Grafana version 10.

For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 9.x, see Alerts in Grafana version 9.

For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 8.x, see Grafana alerting.

When you use Amazon Managed Grafana alerting, you can attach rules to your dashboard panels. When you save the dashboard, Amazon Managed Grafana extracts the alert rules into a separate alert rule storage and schedules them for evaluation.

On the Alert tab of the graph panel, you can configure how often the alert rule should be evaluated and the conditions that must be met for the alert to change state and initiate its notifications.

Currently, only the graph panel supports alert rules.

Adding or editing an alert rule

1. Navigate to the panel where add or edit an alert rule, choose the title, and then choose Edit.

2. On the Alert tab, choose Create Alert. If an alert already exists for this panel, you can edit the fields on the Alert tab.

3. Fill out the fields. For more information, see Alert rule fields.

4. When you have finished writing your rule, choose Save in the upper right corner to save the alert rule and the dashboard.

5. (Optional but recommended) To make sure that the rule returns the results you expect, choose Test rule.

Deleting an alert rule

To delete an alert, scroll to the bottom of the alert, and then choose Delete.

Alert rule fields

This section describes the fields that you fill out to create an alert.

Rule

• Name – Enter a descriptive name. The name will be displayed in the Alert Rules list.

• Evaluate every – Specify how often the scheduler should evaluate the alert rule. This is referred to as the evaluation interval.

• For – Specify how long the query must violate the configured thresholds before the alert notification triggers.

Warning

Do not use For with the If no data or all values are null setting set to No Data. The triggering of No Data will trigger instantly and not take For into consideration. This can also result in an OK notification not being sent if alert transitions from No Data -> Pending -> OK.

If an alert rule has a configured For and the query violates the configured threshold, it will first go from OK to Pending. Going from OK to Pending, Amazon Managed Grafana does not send any notifications. When the alert rule has been firing for more than the For duration, it will change to Alerting and send alert notifications.

Typically, we recommend using this setting because it’s often worse to get false positive than to wait a few minutes before the alert notification initiates. Looking at the Alert list or Alert list panels, you will be able to see alerts that are in the pending state.

Conditions

Currently, the only existing condition type is a Query condition that allows you to specify a query letter, a time range, and an aggregation function.

Query condition example

avg() OF query(A, 15m, now) IS BELOW 14

• avg() Controls how the values for each series should be reduced to a value that can be compared against the threshold. Choose the function to change it to another aggregation function.

• query(A, 15m, now) The letter defines what query to run from the Metrics tab. The second two parameters define the time range: 15m, now means 15 minutes ago to now. You can also use 10m, now-2m to define a time range that will be 10 minutes ago to 2 minutes ago. This is useful if you want to ignore the last 2 minutes of data.

• IS BELOW 14 Defines the type of threshold and the threshold value. You can choose IS BELOW to change the type of threshold.

The query used in an alert rule cannot contain any template variables. Currently, we support only AND and OR operators between conditions, and they are run serially. For example, we have three conditions in the following order: condition:A(evaluates to: TRUE) OR condition:B(evaluates to: FALSE) AND condition:C(evaluates to: TRUE) so the result will be calculated as ((TRUE OR FALSE) AND TRUE) = TRUE.

Multiple series

If a query returns multiple series, the aggregation function and threshold check will be evaluated for each series. Currently, Amazon Managed Grafana does not track the alert rule state per series. The implications of this are detailed in the following scenario.

• An alert condition with query that returns two series: server1 and server2.

• The server1 series causes the alert rule to fire and switch to state Alerting.

• Notifications are sent out with message: load peaking (server1)

• In a subsequent evaluation of the same alert rule, the server2 series also causes the alert rule to fire.

• No new notifications are sent because the alert rule is already in state Alerting.

As you can see from the previous scenario, if the rule already is in state Alerting, Grafana doesn't send out notifications when other series cause the alert to fire.

Note

You can configure reminders to be sent for triggered alerts. This will send additional notifications when an alert continues to fire. If other series (such as server2 in the previous example) also cause the alert rule to fire, they are included in the reminder notification. Depending on which notification channel you’re using, you might be able to take advantage of this feature for identifying new or existing series that are causing alerts to fire.

No data and error handling

The following table contains conditions for controlling how the rule evaluation engine handles queries that return no data or only null values.

No Data Option	Description
No Data	Set alert rule state to NoData.
Alerting	Set alert rule state to Alerting.
Keep Last State	Keep the current alert rule state, whatever it is.
Ok	Supported, but usually not useful.

Execution errors or timeouts

The following options tell Amazon Managed Grafana how to handle execution or timeout errors.

Error or timeout option	Description
Alerting	Set alert rule state to Alerting.
Keep Last State	Keep the current alert rule state, whatever it is.

If you have an unreliable time series store from which queries sometimes time out or fail randomly, you can set this option to Keep Last State to basically ignore them.

Notifications

On Alert tab, you can also specify alert rule notifications and a detailed message about the alert rule. The message can contain anything: information about how you might solve the issue, link to runbook, and so on.

The actual notifications are configured and shared between multiple alerts. For information on how to configure and set up notifications, see Alert notifications.

• Send to – Select an alert notification channel if you have one set up.

• Message – Enter a text message to be sent on the notification channel. Some alert notifiers support transforming the text to HTML or other rich formats.

• Tags – Specify a list of tags (key-value) to be included in the notification. It is supported by only some notifiers.

Alert state history and annotations

Alert state changes are recorded in the internal annotation table in the Amazon Managed Grafana database. The state changes are visualized as annotations in the graph panel of the alert rulel. You can also go into the State history submenu on the Alert tab to view and clear state history.