Documentation Grafana Cloud Alerts and IRM Alerting Configure notifications Configure contact points Email

Configure email for Alerting

Use the Grafana Alerting - email integration to send email notifications when your alerts are firing. An email is sent when an alert fires and when an alert gets resolved.

Note that you can customize the subject and message of the email using notification templates. However, you cannot add HTML and CSS to email notifications for visual changes.

Before you begin

For Grafana OSS, you enable email notifications by first configuring SMTP settings in the Grafana configuration settings.

SMTP configuration

1. Access the configuration file.

   Locate the Grafana configuration file. This file is typically named grafana.ini or custom.ini and is located in the conf directory within the Grafana installation directory.

2. Open the configuration file:

   Open the configuration file using a text editor.

3. Locate SMTP settings section.

   Search for the SMTP settings section in the configuration file. It starts with [smtp].

4. Configure SMTP settings.

   Within the [smtp] settings section, specify the following parameters:

   • enabled = true: Enables SMTP.
   • host: The hostname or IP address of your SMTP server, and the port number of your SMTP server (commonly 25, 465, or 587). Default is localhost:25.
   • user: Your SMTP username (if authentication is required).
   • password: Your SMTP password (if authentication is required).
   • from_address: The email address from which Grafana notifications will be sent.
   • from_name: The name associated with the from_address.
   • skip_verify = true: Skip SSL/TLS certificate verification (useful for testing, but not recommended for production).

5. Save and close the configuration file.

   After configuring the SMTP settings, save the changes to the configuration file and close the text editor.

6. Restart Grafana.

   Restart the Grafana service to apply the changes made to the configuration file. The method for restarting Grafana depends on your operating system and how Grafana was installed (e.g., systemctl restart grafana-server for systems using systemd).

7. Test email notifications.

   After restarting Grafana, test the email notification functionality by creating an email contact point.

Procedure

To set up email integration, complete the following steps.

1. Navigate to Alerts & IRM -> Alerting -> Contact points.

2. Click + Add contact point.

3. Enter a contact point name.

4. From the Integration list, select Email.

5. Enter the email addresses you want to send notifications to.

   E-mail addresses are case sensitive. Ensure that the e-mail address entered is correct.

6. Click Test to check that your integration works.

   ** For Grafana Alertmanager only.**

7. Click Save contact point.

Next steps

The email contact point is ready to receive alert notifications.

To add this contact point to your alert, complete the following steps.

1. In Grafana, navigate to Alerting > Alert rules.
2. Edit or create a new alert rule.
3. Scroll down to the Configure labels and notifications section.
4. Under Notifications click Select contact point.
5. From the drop-down menu, select the previously created contact point.
6. Click Save rule and exit.