Overview

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.

The following gives you an overview of how Grafana Alerting works and introduces you to some of the key concepts that work together and form the core of its flexible and powerful alerting engine.

1. Data source

   Connects to data to be used by alerting. This data is often time-series data, for alerts, and shows the details of a system to be monitored and analyzed. For more information, see data sources.

2. Alert rules

   Set evaluation criteria that determines whether an alert instance will fire. An alert rule consists of one or more queries and expressions to pull data from the datasource, a condition describing what constitutes the need for an alert, the frequency of evaluation, and optionally, the duration over which the condition must be met for an alert to fire.

   Grafana managed alerts support multi-dimensional alerting, which means that each alert rule can create multiple alert instances. This is exceptionally powerful if you are observing multiple series in a single expression.

3. Labels

   Match an alert rule and its instances to notification policies and silences. They can also be used to group your alerts by severity.

4. Notification policies

   Set where, when, and how the alerts get routed to notify your team when the alert fires. Each notification policy specifies a set of label matchers to indicate which alerts they are responsible for. A notification policy has a contact point assigned to it that consists of one or more notifiers.

5. Contact points

   Define how your contacts are notified when an alert fires. We support a multitude of ChatOps tools to ensure the alerts come to your team.

Features

One page for all alerts

A single Grafana Alerting page consolidates both Grafana-managed alerts and alerts that reside in your Prometheus-compatible data source in one single place.

Multi-dimensional alerts

Alert rules can create multiple individual alert instances per alert rule, known as multi-dimensional alerts, giving you the power and flexibility to gain visibility into your entire system with just a single alert.

Routing alerts

Route each alert instance to a specific contact point based on labels you define. Notification policies are the set of rules for where, when, and how the alerts are routed to contact points.

Silencing alerts

Silences allow you to stop receiving persistent notifications from one or more alerting rules. You can also partially pause an alert based on certain criteria. Silences have their own dedicated section for better organization and visibility, so that you can scan your paused alert rules without cluttering the main alerting view.

Mute timings

With mute timings, you can specify a time interval when you don’t want new notifications to be generated or sent. You can also freeze alert notifications for recurring periods of time, such as during a maintenance period.