Silencing alert notifications for Prometheus data sources

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.

For external Alert manager data sources (including Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus), you can suppress alert notifications with a silence. A silence only stops notifications from being created: Silences do not prevent alert rules from being evaluated, and they do not stop alerting instances from being shown in the user interface. When you silence an alert, you specify a window of time for it to be suppressed.

You can configure silences for an external Alertmanager data source.

Note

To suppress alert notifications at regular time intervals, or for other data sources, (for example, during regular maintenance periods), use Mute timings rather than silences.

To add a silence

1. From your Grafana console, in the Grafana menu, choose Alerts & IRM, Alerting.

2. Choose Silences.

3. Choose an Alertmanager from the Alertmanager dropdown.

4. Choose Create Silence.

5. Select the start and end date in Silence start and end to indicate when the silence should go into effect and when it should end.

6. As an alternative to setting an end time, in Duration, specify how long the silence is enforced. This automatically updates the end time in the Silence start and end field.

7. In the Label and Value fields, enter one or more Matching Labels. Matchers determine which rules the silence applies to. Any matching alerts (in firing state), will show in the Affected alerts instances field.

8. Optionally, add a Comment describing the silence.

9. Choose Submit.

To edit a silence

1. From your Grafana console, in the Grafana menu, choose Alerts & IRM, Alerting.

2. Choose Silences to view the list of existing silences.

3. Find the silence you want to edit, then choose Edit (pen icon).

4. Make any desired changes, then choose Submit to save your changes.

You can edit an existing silence by choosing the Edit icon (pen).

To create a URL link to a silence form

When linking to a silence form, provide the default matching labels and comment via matcher and comment query parameters. The matcher parameter should be in the following format [label][operator][value] where the operator parameter can be one of the following: = (equals, not regex), != (not equals, not regex), =~ (equals, regex), !~ (not equals, regex). The URL can contain many query parameters with the key matcher. For example, to link to silence form with matching labels severity=critical & cluster!~europe-.* and comment Silence critical EU alerts, create a URL https://mygrafana/alerting/silence/new?matcher=severity%3Dcritical&matcher=cluster!~europe-*&comment=Silence%20critical%20EU%20alert.

To link to a new silence page for an external Alertmanager, add an alertmanager query parameter

To remove a silence

1. From your Grafana console, in the Grafana menu, choose Alerts & IRM, Alerting.

2. Choose Silences to view the list of existing silences.

3. Select the silence that you want to end, and choose Unsilence. This ends the alert suppression.

   Note

   Unsilencing ends the alert suppression, as if the end time was set for the current time. Silences that have ended (automatically or manually) are retained and listed for five days. You cannot remove a silence from the list manually.