A smarter filter for Grafana Alerting: Introducing a new way to find your alerts

At Grafana Labs, we believe that effective alerting is the cornerstone of any robust observability strategy. That’s why we’re constantly listening to your feedback and working to improve the Grafana user experience so it’s easier for you to manage and interact with your alert rules. 

Today, we’ve excited to tell you about an update in Grafana Alerting that’s built to address some of your biggest pain points. We’re releasing a brand new filtering experience for the alert rules list view that’s designed to help you quickly and easily find the alert rules you need, with a cleaner UI, more filtering options, and a solid foundation for future enhancements.

A cleaner, more powerful solution

The previous filtering function for alert rules presented some challenges. We heard from many of you that the filter fields took up valuable screen space and that you wanted more ways to narrow down your searches. It was clear that the user experience needed to be more intuitive and less cluttered.

Our goal was to create a filtering system that reduces cognitive load and gives you greater control:

• More filtering options: You can now filter by additional criteria that users have been asking for: Namespace, Label, Evaluation group, and Rule Source. This provides more granular control over your searches.
• Cleaner UI: By moving the filters into a popup, we’ve reduced screen clutter and given you more room to view your alert rules, making the page more efficient and less overwhelming.
• Improved user experience: The new filter features dropdowns, making it easier to select the criteria you want to search by. It also reduces the need for familiarity with the search field syntax.
• Foundation for the future: This new filtering system is a crucial step towards more advanced search functionality. It lays the groundwork for powerful features like saved searches, which we plan to explore in future releases.

This new feature is already being rolled out across Grafana Cloud, and it will be included as a generally available feature in the Grafana 12.3 release this October.

A side-by-side look

As you can see from the two screenshots below, the new UI offers a cleaner and more cohesive experience. While the previous filter took up valuable screen space, the new filter is now contained within a popup.

We’ve kept the search field for manual filtering, but you can also click the Filter button to access a full list of additional dropdowns, including Namespace, Labels, Evaluation group, and Rule source, giving you more control over your search.

Old filter: 

New filter:

Use cases

Now that we’ve shown you how the new filtering experience works, let’s look at a few examples of how you can use the new filter to solve both old and new problems.

In the old search experience, some of the properties (Label, Namespace, Evaluation group, etc.) had no individual filters, so the only filtering option was to type your search string in the search field. This meant that you had to obey the exact search syntax. But with the new filters, you can just directly interact with the selectors. And don’t mind the syntax—it’s automatically populated.

In addition, if you wanted to filter by label in the old search experience, you had to type the exact key/value in the search field. This means you had to know the available key-value pairs and keep to the right spelling. With the new filters you can now use a dropdown to browse all available labels and just pick the one you need.

At the same time, all existing functionality is preserved. So if you prefer typing, or you’d like to send a search string to a colleague, you can use the search field the same as you did before.

How to get started

The new filter is available in the alert rules list view today. Simply click the Filter button at the top of the list to get started. We encourage you to try it out and share your feedback with us on the Grafana Community Forums.

We’re committed to building tools that are not only powerful but also intuitive and a pleasure to use. Stay tuned for more updates!

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