Alerting in Grafana

Grafana alerting has evolved significantly over the last few versions to a complex, powerful, and versatile system for combining monitoring, alerting, and notification. Its power can be a bit intimidating but bear in mind that you may not need every capability in Grafana alerting.

We’ll take things step by step, so you can see how the parts fit together. Once you understand the basics, if you run into a more complex observability scenario, you will know how best to extend your own alerting to accommodate it.

Let’s start by reviewing how the Grafana alerting works. There are four main components to Grafana alerting: alert rules, labels, notification policies, and contact points. We’ll go over their roles one by one.

Alert rules

Alert rules are the trigger mechanism for Grafana alerting. You can have all the metrics you want streaming into Grafana, but if you don’t have any alert rules, how would you know when something is wrong...