Silencing alert notifications for Prometheus data sources

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.

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 the Alerting (bell) icon to open the Alerting page.

2. Choose Silences to open a page listing existing Working with contact points.

3. Choose the external Alertmanager from the Alertmanager dropdown.

4. Select Add 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.

   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.

6. In the Name and Value fields, enter one or more Matching Labels. Matchers determine which rules the silence applies to. Label matching is discussed in more detail following this procedure.

7. Optionally, add a Comment, or modify the Creator to set the owner of the silence.

8. Choose Create to create the silence.

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

Label matching for alert suppression

When you create a silence, you create a set of matching labels as part of the silence. This is a set of rules about labels that must match for the alert to be suppressed. The matching labels consist of three parts:

• Label – The name of the label to match. It must exactly match the label name of the alert.

• Operator – The operator used to compare the label value with the matching label value. The available operators are:

  • = Select labels whose value exactly matches the provided string.

  • != Select labels whose value does not match the provided string.

  • =~ Select labels whose value match the regex interpreted value of the provided string (the provided string is interpreted as a regular expression).

  • != Select labels that do not match the provided regular expression.

• Value – The value to match the label value to. It can match as a string or as a regular expression, depending on the operator chosen.

A silence ends at the indicated end date, but you can manually end the suppression at any time.

To end a silence manually

1. In the Alerting page, choose Silences to view the list of existing silences.

2. 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.

Creating a link to the silence creation form

You can create a URL to the silence creation form with details already filled in. Operators can use this to suppress an alarm quickly during an operational event.

When creating a link to a silence form, use a matchers query parameter to specify the matching labels, and a comment query parameter to specify a comment. The matchers parameter requires one or more values in the form [label][operator][value], separated by commas.

Example URL

To link to a silence form, with matching labels severity=critical and cluster!~europe-.*, with a comment that says Silencing critical EU alerts, use a URL like the following. Replace mygrafana with the hostname of your Grafana instance.

https://mygrafana/alerting/silence/new?matchers=severity%3Dcritical%2Ccluster!~europe-*&comment=Silence%20critical%20EU%20alert

To link to a new silence page for an external Alertmanager, add an alertmanager query parameter with the Alertmanage data source name, such as alertmanager=myAlertmanagerdatasource.