Grafana Alerting: How It All Works Now
Grafana, an open-source platform for data visualization, monitoring and analysis, has recently released Version 9.0 which brought major updates to alerting. In this article, we quickly look into Grafana Alerting to figure out how it works.
Back in Version 8, open source alerting functionality was added in test mode. It introduced a new interface with a single dashboard to manage all Grafana and Prometheus alerts. Over the course of a year, the developers could better understand what users needed and made efforts to implement a full-fledged built-in alerting system in Grafana.
In a nutshell, here's what you can do with alerting now:
- You can create several alerts for similar actions within one rule and manage each one separately, since the multi-dimensional alert rule has grown to multi-dimensional alerts.
- You can use labels to distinguish between alert instances, group alerts associated with the same action or component, route them to the required channel, and create notification policies to set the conditions for alert delivery. All this together helps receive a single notification instead of a bunch of similar ones and send one notification to several channels at once.
- You can completely stop or pause alerts from one or several rules using the Silences feature and turn them off at specific times, e.g. weekends, using the Mute timings feature.
Grafana 9.1.x is now available and you can test the new functionality yourself. And to make using Grafana alerts even more handy, set up sending them to your favorite chatting app, for example, Signal, Discord or Slack. To make it work, use the Notify.Events notification service.
The tool helps receiving notifications in a convenient way not only from Grafana, but also from 40+ other services that you use daily. More than 50 ways to receive notifications are available: messengers, push, SMS and voice calls.
