If an alert is triggered but no one gets a notification, did anything really happen? The notification is the side effect of an alert, and the notification's action is executed by a notification channel. The notification channel is a plugin integration similar in concept to a data source. It represents a generalized interface for setting up the parameters necessary for the Grafana server to use the notification application API to pass along the alert's message. There are a number of notification channels shipped with Grafana, including emails, webhooks, PagerDuty, Slack, HipChat, and many more.
Setting up an email notification channel
Unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of this book to cover all the notification channels, but we will look at email as it is the simplest and doesn't require a third-party application. Any modern computer should have all the tools needed to set up the email notification channel...
