Create data source-managed recording rules

Recording rules allow you to periodically pre-compute frequently used or computationally expensive queries, saving the results as a new time series metric.

Alert rules and dashboards can then query the new metric resulting from the recording rule. This is faster than querying real-time data and can help to reduce system load.

Data source-managed recording rules can query Prometheus-based data sources like Mimir or Loki. For more information on recording rules in Prometheus, refer to Defining recording rules in Prometheus.

Note that in data source-managed groups, the alert rules and recording rules within the same evaluation group are evaluated sequentially. This is useful to ensure that a recording rule is evaluated before any other alert rule queries the pre-computed metric.

Before you begin

Verify that you have write permission to the Prometheus or Loki data source. Otherwise, you will not be able to create or update Grafana Mimir managed alerting rules.
For Grafana Mimir and Loki data sources, enable the ruler API by configuring their respective services.
- Loki - The local rule storage type, default for the Loki data source, supports only viewing of rules. To edit rules, configure one of the other rule storage types.
- Mimir - use the /prometheus prefix. The Prometheus data source supports both Grafana Mimir and Prometheus, and Grafana expects that both the Query API and Ruler API are under the same URL. You cannot provide a separate URL for the Ruler API.

Add new recording rule

To create a new data source-managed recording rule:

Click Alerts & IRM -> Alerting -> Alert rules.
Scroll to the Data source-managed section and click +New recording rule.

Enter recording rule name

The recording rule name must be a Prometheus metric name and contain no whitespace.

Define recording rule

Select your data source and enter a query. The queries used in data source-managed recording rules always run as instant queries.

Add namespace and group

From the Namespace dropdown, select an existing rule namespace or add a new one.
Namespaces can contain one or more rule groups and only have an organizational purpose.
From the Group dropdown, select an existing group within the selected namespace or add a new one.
Rules within a group are run sequentially at a regular interval, with the same evaluation time.
Newly created rules are appended to the end of the group, and you can reorder them from the Alert rules page.

Add labels

Optionally, you can add custom labels to the resulting metric by selecting existing key-value pairs from the drop down or entering the new key or value.