Mute timings

This documentation topic is designed for Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 9.x.

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

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

A mute timing is a recurring interval of time when no new notifications for a policy are generated or sent. Use them to prevent alerts from firing a specific and reoccurring period, for example, a regular maintenance period.

Similar to silences, mute timings do not prevent alert rules from being evaluated, nor do they stop alert instances from being shown in the user interface. They only prevent notifications from being created.

You can configure Grafana managed mute timings as well as mute timings for an external Alertmanager data source.

Mute timings compared to silences

The following table highlights the differences between mute timings and silences.

Mute timing	Silence
Uses time interval definitions that can reoccur.	Has a fixed start and end time.
Is created and then added to notification policies.	Uses labels to match against an alert to determine whether to silence or not.
Works with Grafana alerting and external Alertmanagers.	Works only with external Alertmanagers.

To create a mute timing

1. From your Grafana console, in the Grafana menu, choose the Alerting (bell) icon to open the Alerting page.

2. Choose Notification policies.

3. From the Alertmanager dropdown, select the Alertmanager you want to edit.

4. In the Mute timings section, choose the Add mute timing button.

5. Choose the time interval for which you want the mute timing to apply.

6. Choose Submit to create the mute timing.

To add a mute timing to a notification policy

1. Select the notification policy you would like to add the mute timing to, and choose the Edit button.

2. From the Mute timings dropdown, select the mute timings you would like to add to the policy.

   Choose the Save policy button.

Time intervals

A time interval is a definition for a range of time. If an alert is initiated during this interval it is suppressed. Ranges are supported using : (for example, monday:thursday). A mute timing can contain multiple time intervals. A time interval consists of multiple fields (details in the following list), all of which must match in order to suppress the alerts. For example, if you specify days of the week monday:friday and time range from 8:00-9:00, then alerts are suppressed from 8–9, Monday through Friday, but not, for example, 8–9 on Saturday.

• Time range – The time of day to suppress notifications. Consists of two sub-fields, Start time and End time. An example time is 14:30. Time is in 24 hour notation, in UTC.

• Days of the week – The days of the week. Can be a single day, such as monday, a range, such as monday:friday, or a comma-separate list of days, such as monday, tuesday, wednesday.

• Months – The months to select. You can specify months with numeric designations, or with the full month name, for example 1 or january both specify January. You can specify a single month, a range of months, or a comma-separated list of months.

• Days of the month – The dates within a month. Values can range from 1-31. Negative values specify days of the month in reverse order, so -1 represents the last day of the month. Days of the month can be specified as a single day, a range of days, or a comma-separate list of days.

• Years – The year or years for the interval. For example, 2023:2025.

Each of these elements can be a list, and at least one item in the element must be satisfied to be a match. So if you set years to 2023:2025, 2027, then it would be true during 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2027 (but not 2026).

If a field is left blank, any moment of time will match the field. A moment of time must match all fields to match a complete time interval.

If you want to specify an exact duration, specify all the options needed for that duration. For example, if you wanted to create a time interval for the first Monday of the month, for March, June, September, and December, between the hours of 12:00 and 24:00 UTC, your time interval specification could be:

• Time range:

  • Start time: 12:00

  • End time: 24:00

• Days of the week: monday

• Months: 3, 6, 9, 12

• Days of the month: 1:7