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Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

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Legacy Grafana alerts

Out of the box, Grafana still supports legacy dashboard alerts. If you are using version 8.0 or later, you can opt-in to use Grafana 8 alerts. See What’s New with Grafana 8 alerting for more information.

Legacy alerts have two main components:

  • Alert rule - When the alert is triggered. Alert rules are defined by one or more conditions that are regularly evaluated by Grafana.
  • Notification channel - How the alert is delivered. When the conditions of an alert rule are met, the Grafana notifies the channels configured for that alert.

Alert tasks

You can perform the following tasks for alerts:

Clustering

The current alerting system doesn’t support high availability. Alert notifications are not deduplicated and load balancing is not supported between instances; for example, silences from one instance will not appear in the other.

Alert evaluation

Grafana managed alerts are evaluated by the Grafana backend. Rule evaluations are scheduled, according to the alert rule configuration, and queries are evaluated by an engine that is part of core Grafana.

Alerting rules can only query backend data sources with alerting enabled:

  • builtin or developed and maintained by grafana: Graphite, Prometheus, Loki, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, Google Cloud Monitoring, Cloudwatch, Azure Monitor, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, OpenTSDB, Oracle, and Azure Data Explorer
  • any community backend data sources with alerting enabled (backend and alerting properties are set in the plugin.json)

Metrics from the alerting engine

The alerting engine publishes some internal metrics about itself. You can read more about how Grafana publishes internal metrics. See also, View alert rules and their current state.

Metric NameTypeDescription
alerting.alertsgaugeHow many alerts by state
alerting.request_duration_secondshistogramHistogram of requests to the Alerting API
alerting.active_configurationsgaugeThe number of active, non default alertmanager configurations for grafana managed alerts
alerting.rule_evaluations_totalcounterThe total number of rule evaluations
alerting.rule_evaluation_failures_totalcounterThe total number of rule evaluation failures
alerting.rule_evaluation_duration_secondssummaryThe duration for a rule to execute
alerting.rule_group_rulesgaugeThe number of rules