Grafana is a leading open-source platform for monitoring and observability, widely recognized for its powerful visualization and alerting capabilities. For organizations managing complex infrastructures or applications, timely notifications are crucial to maintaining system health and performance.

This guide focuses on understanding the critical terminologies—alert rules and notification policies—that form the backbone of Grafana's alerting system. By mastering these concepts, you can set up a robust monitoring infrastructure that ensures you respond to issues proactively, minimizing downtime and improving operational efficiency.

When working with alerting in Grafana, understanding the core terminologies is crucial for effectively setting up and managing alerts. Two key terms you’ll frequently encounter are Alert Rules and Notification Policies.

Let’s break them down:

Alert Rules

Alert rules are the core component of Grafana’s alerting system. An alert rule defines the conditions that trigger an alert. Each alert rule consists of a set of criteria based on metrics, thresholds, and time intervals that are evaluated continuously. When these criteria are met, the alert changes state (e.g., from "OK" to "Alerting"), indicating that something requires attention.

• Key Elements of an Alert Rule:
  • Conditions: Define what metrics to evaluate and under what circumstances the alert should be triggered (e.g., CPU usage exceeds 80% for 5 minutes).
  • Evaluation Interval: Specifies how often Grafana should check the condition (e.g., every minute).
  • Alert States: Alert rules can have different states like “OK,” “Pending,” “Alerting,” and “No Data.”
  • Alert Queries: These are the data sources and metrics that Grafana queries for the alert rule.

To set up effective alert rules, you must define your conditions and intervals based on the metrics you want to monitor. This will allow you to be notified when something goes outside of normal operating parameters, ensuring you can respond quickly to potential issues.

Grafana supports two different alert rule types:

• Grafana-managed alert rules
• Data source-managed alert rules

Grafana-managed alert rules

Grafana-managed alert rules offer the highest level of flexibility, enabling you to create alert rules based on data from any supported data source or even combine multiple data sources within a single rule.

You can also apply expressions to manipulate your data and customize alert conditions. Furthermore, these alert rules support the inclusion of images in notifications for enhanced clarity.

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Data source-managed Alert Rules

Data source-managed alert rules are available for Grafana Mimir or Grafana Loki data sources set up to support rule creation. These rules can enhance query performance through recording rules and provide high availability and fault tolerance in distributed architectures.

However, they are only compatible with Grafana Mimir or Grafana Loki data sources that are enabled by the Ruler API. For more details, refer to the Loki Ruler API or Mimir Ruler API documentation.

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Learn more about Alert Rules here!

Notification Policies

Notification policies control where and how alerts are sent after an alert rule is triggered. In Grafana, notifications can be sent to a variety of destinations, including email, Slack, webhooks, PagerDuty, and more. Notification policies allow you to set rules for routing alerts to different channels based on their severity, alert group, or other conditions.

Key Features of Notification Policies:

• Routing Alerts: Customize how alerts are routed based on the content of the alert or its labels.
• Grouping: Group multiple alerts together based on common characteristics (e.g., send all CPU-related alerts as one notification).
• Silencing: Temporarily mute alerts for a specific period, ensuring that only critical notifications are delivered during maintenance or downtime.
• Escalation: You can configure notification policies to escalate alerts if they are not acknowledged within a certain timeframe, ensuring that critical alerts receive the necessary attention.

Notification policies provide flexibility in how alerts are handled, allowing teams to ensure that the right people are informed of critical issues through the most appropriate channels.

Learn more about Notification Policies here.

By mastering these critical terminologies—alert rules and notification policies—you’ll be well-equipped to create a robust alerting system in Grafana that keeps you informed of important metrics and helps you respond to incidents promptly.

Alert message templates in Grafana allow you to customize the content and format of the notifications sent when an alert is triggered. This is essential for providing relevant context in your alerts, ensuring that the recipients have all the information they need to respond effectively.

By utilizing templating and custom formatting, you can tailor alert messages based on your specific needs and the data provided by Grafana.

In the next section, we'll explore how to manage your alerts using notification policies effectively. We'll cover how to route, group, and escalate alerts based on specific criteria such as severity or alert labels, ensuring that the right teams receive timely notifications for critical issues.

By structuring your notification policies correctly, you'll be able to streamline alert management and optimize response times, preventing alert fatigue and improving operational efficiency.

Notification policies in Grafana allow you to define how alerts are routed, grouped and escalated based on certain criteria, such as the severity of the alert, labels, or the alert's source.

By setting up well-structured notification policies, you ensure that the right alerts are sent to the right people at the right time, improving response times and preventing alert fatigue.

Step-by-Step Process of Setting Up Notification Policies

1. Define Contact Points:

Contact points represent the destinations where notifications are sent, such as email, Slack, PagerDuty, or webhooks. Configure your contact points first by navigating to Alerting > Notification Policies > Contact Points and adding your preferred destinations.

2. Create Notification Policies:

After configuring contact points, define notification policies that determine how alerts are routed. You can set up policies that send notifications based on alert labels, severity levels, or alert state changes (e.g., from "OK" to "Alerting").

Notification policies can be customized to group multiple alerts into a single notification, suppress alerts during maintenance windows, or escalate alerts when they are not resolved.

3. Grouping and Routing:

Notification policies allow you to group alerts based on similar characteristics (e.g., same service or region) and send them as a single notification. You can also route alerts to different teams based on labels like service, region, or severity.

For example, critical alerts related to the "backend" service can be sent to the engineering team, while non-critical alerts can be sent to another team.

4. Escalation Rules:

Escalation rules ensure that if an alert is not acknowledged within a specific timeframe, it is escalated to higher-priority contact points. This helps ensure that critical issues are addressed promptly.

Setting Up Grafana Email Configuration

Configuring email notifications in Grafana allows you to receive alerts directly in your inbox. Here's how to set up email notifications:

1. Configure SMTP Server:

First, configure your SMTP server by editing the Grafana configuration file (grafana.ini). Specify your SMTP server details, such as the host, port, username, and password:

Save the configuration file and restart Grafana to apply the changes.

2. Set Up Email Contact Points:

• Go to Alerting > Notification Policies > Contact Points.
• Click Add Contact Point and select Email as the notification type.
• Enter the recipient email addresses and configure the subject and body template for the email.
• Test the configuration to ensure that the email notifications are working correctly.

3. Send Email Notifications

Once configured, you can route alerts to email by including the email contact point in your notification policies.

You can also watch this tutorial on setting up email alerts.

Sending Alerts to Slack

Grafana's Slack integration allows you to send alerts to Slack channels, making it easier for teams to collaborate and respond to incidents in real-time. Here's how to set up Slack notifications:

1. Create a Slack Webhook:
   • In your Slack workspace, create an incoming webhook by navigating to Slack App Directory > Incoming Webhooks.
   • Choose a Slack channel where the alerts should be posted and generate a webhook URL.
2. Configure Slack Contact Points in Grafana:
   • Go to Alerting > Notification Policies > Contact Points.
   • Click Add Contact Point and select Slack as the notification type.
   • Paste the Slack webhook URL and specify the message format. You can customize the message to include key details like the alert name, severity, and a link to the Grafana dashboard.
3. Test and Apply:

Test the Slack configuration to ensure that alerts are sent successfully to the specified channel. Once tested, add the Slack contact point to your notification policies.

Watch this tutorial on configuring Slack alerts.

Setting Up & Configuring Webhooks in Grafana Alerts

Webhooks allow you to send Grafana alerts to any external system that supports HTTP endpoints. This is useful for integrating with custom notification systems, incident management platforms, or automation workflows.

1. Create a Webhook Endpoint:

Set up an HTTP endpoint on the external system where Grafana will send the alerts. Ensure that the endpoint can accept POST requests containing alert data.

2. Configure Webhook Contact Points in Grafana:

• Go to Alerting > Notification Policies > Contact Points.
• Click Add Contact Point and select Webhook as the notification type.
• Enter the webhook URL where Grafana will send the alert data.
• Optionally, customize the payload template to fit the format required by the external system.

3. Test and Apply:

Test the webhook configuration by triggering an alert and verifying that the external system receives the notification. Once confirmed, use the webhook contact point in your notification policies.

Webhooks provide a flexible way to integrate Grafana alerts with a variety of external services, allowing for greater customization and automation of alerting workflows.

Learn more about configuring webhooks in Grafana.