Mute timing vs. silences in Grafana Alerting: How to pick the best fit for your use case
Have you ever been in a situation where know your team is going to run their weekly maintenance window and you silence your notifications to prevent a flood of false positives from pinging your inbox?
If you are associated with a team that uses any type of alert system, you know how easily alert fatigue can happen. The incessant and unpredictable (or even, at times, predictable) pings, emails, and notification alerts can drive even the most serene worker totally batty.
But with Grafana Alerting, you control when alerts should fire a notification and when you want to keep things quiet. And while you may know that you can suppress all that noise, you might not know if it’s best to silence the notification or simply mute it temporarily.
This guide will give you a high-level understanding of each feature within Grafana Alerting, as well as examples of when to use them.
What is a mute timing?
Mute timings are recurring intervals of time during which no new notifications are generated or sent for alerts. They are designed for predictable, scheduled suppression, such as during regular maintenance periods or specific times of the day or week.
Mute timings are set to repeat based on a defined schedule. This cadence could be something like every Monday from 13:00-14:00 or only on the 15th and 30th day of the month.
Configured via the Grafana console under Alerts & IRM > Alerting > Notification policies > Time Intervals tab > Add Time interval, you will be able to define time intervals with fields like time range, days of the week, days of the month, or specific months or years.
Note: The processes outlined in this blog will be the same whether you’re using Grafana OSS or Grafana Cloud.
Mute timings are applied to a notification policy and will affect all alerts routed to that policy during the specified intervals. It is possible to have multiple time intervals included in a single mute timing.
Ideally, these will be used for suppressing notifications during planned, recurring events like backups, scheduled maintenance, or off-hours.
What are silences?
Silences are one-time suppressions of alert notifications for a specific duration—typically used for temporary scenarios like a one-off maintenance window or an operational event.
Silences are set for a specific start and end time and do not recur. Once expired, they are retained in the UI for five days but cannot be manually removed.
Configured via Alerts & IRM > Alerting > Silences in the Grafana console, you will specify a duration, start/end times, and can use label matchers to target specific alerts.
For example, a label like severity=critical is broad enough that it will capture your most critical alerts and silence that group for the specified period of time. These can also be applied to all alerts managed by a chosen Alertmanager. Rule-specific silences can target individual alert rules using the __alert_rule_uid__ label.
Key differences
While both tools offer a similar experience, there are many differences between each. To simplify this further, use this table as a quick reference guide:
Aspect | Mute timings | Silences |
|---|---|---|
Recurrence | Recurring, scheduled intervals | One-time, specific duration |
Purpose | Regular, predictable suppression | Temporary, one-off suppression |
Configuration | Set in "Notification Policies" with time intervals | Set in "Silences" with start/end times and optional label matchers |
Scope | Applied to notification policies | Applied to specific alerts or Alertmanager |
Use Case | Maintenance schedules, off-hours | Ad-hoc maintenance, incident response |
Duration | Ongoing, based on schedule | Fixed, expires after set time |
Retention | Persistent as part of policy | Retained for five days after expiration |
Optimize alert notifications for your specific needs
Mute timings and silences are two very important tools in the Grafana ecosystem that help to alleviate alert fatigue among your workforce. While both offerings provide that relief, optimizing the use of each one to its highest capacity not only creates an efficient alerting environment but also takes automation to a higher level.
Being able to schedule a one time silence in the instance of an incident or outage gives you leverage to allow your teams to work on the most critical components during your most vulnerable times, while mute timings eliminate the need to waste time scheduling muting during a recurring expected period of downtime.
For full details on how to configure either a mute timing or silence you can reference the linked documents for further instruction.
Happy alerting!
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