Adding an external Alertmanager

This documentation topic is designed for Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 10.x.

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

For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 8.x, see Working in Grafana version 8.

Set up Grafana to use an external Alertmanager as a single Alertmanager to receive all of your alerts. This external Alertmanager can then be configured and administered from within Grafana itself.

Note

You can't use Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus as an external Alertmanager.

Once you have added the alertmanager, you can use the Grafana Alerting UI to manage silences, contact points, and notification policies. A dropdown option in these pages allows you to switch between alertmanagers.

External alertmanagers are configured as data sources using Grafana Configuration from the main Grafana navigation menu. This enables you to manage the contact points and notification policies of external alertmanagers from within Grafana and also encrypts HTTP basic authentication credentials that were previously visible when configuring external alertmanagers by URL.

Note

Starting with Grafana 9.2, the URL configuration of external alertmanagers from the Admin tab on the Alerting page is deprecated. It will be removed in a future release.

To add an external Alertmanager

1. Choose Connections from the main left menu.

2. Search for Alertmanager.

3. Choose the Create a new data source button.

4. Fill out the fields on the page, as required.

   If you are provisioning your data source, set the flag handleGrafanaManagedAlerts in the jsonData field to true to send Grafana-managed alerts to this Alertmanager.

   Note

   Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, and Cortex implementations of Alertmanager are supported. For Prometheus, contact points and notification policies are read-only in the Grafana Alerting UI.

5. Choose Save & test.