DocumentationGrafana documentationAlertingSet upConfigure Alertmanagers

Configure Alertmanagers

Grafana Alerting is based on the architecture of the Prometheus alerting system. Grafana sends firing and resolved alerts to an Alertmanager, which is responsible for handling notifications.

Grafana Alertmanager

Grafana has its own built-in Alertmanager, referred to as “Grafana” in the user interface. It is the default Alertmanager and can only handle Grafana-managed alerts.

Cloud Alertmanager

Each Grafana Cloud instance comes preconfigured with an additional Alertmanager (grafanacloud-STACK_NAME-ngalertmanager) from the Mimir (Prometheus) instance running in the Grafana Cloud Stack. The Cloud Alertmanager can handle both Grafana-managed and data source-managed alerts.

Other Alertmanagers

Grafana Alerting also supports sending alerts to other alertmanagers, such as the Prometheus Alertmanager, which can handle Grafana-managed alerts and data sources-managed alerts such as alerts from Loki, Mimir, and Prometheus.

You can use a combination of Alertmanagers. The decision often depends on your alerting setup and where your alerts are being generated. Here are two examples of when you may want to add an Alertmanager and send your alerts there instead of using the built-in Grafana Alertmanager.

1. You may already have Alertmanagers on-premises in your own Cloud infrastructure that you still want to use because you have other alert generators, such as Prometheus.

2. You want to use both Prometheus on-premises and hosted Grafana to send alerts to the same Alertmanager that runs in your Cloud infrastructure.

Add an Alertmanager

From Grafana, you can configure and administer your own Alertmanager to receive Grafana alerts.

After you have added the Alertmanager, you can use the Grafana Alerting UI to manage silences, contact points, and notification policies. A drop-down option in these pages allows you to switch between alertmanagers.

Alertmanagers should now be configured as data sources using Grafana Configuration from the main Grafana navigation menu. This enables you to manage the contact points and notification policies of external alertmanagers from within Grafana and also encrypts HTTP basic authentication credentials.

To add an Alertmanager, complete the following steps.

1. Click Connections in the left-side menu.

2. On the Connections page, search for Alertmanager.

3. Click the Create a new data source button.

   If you don’t see this button, you may need to install the plugin, relaunch your Cloud instance, and then repeat steps 1 and 2.

4. Fill out the fields on the page, as required.

   If you are provisioning your data source, set the flag handleGrafanaManagedAlerts in the jsonData field to true to send Grafana-managed alerts to this Alertmanager.

   Note: Prometheus, Grafana Mimir, and Cortex implementations of Alertmanager are supported. For Prometheus, contact points and notification policies are read-only in the Grafana Alerting UI.

5. Click Save & test.