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Documentation Grafana documentation Alerting Alert notifications

Alert notifications

When an alert changes state, it sends out notifications. Each alert rule can have multiple notifications. In order to add a notification to an alert rule you first need to add and configure a notification channel (can be email, PagerDuty, or other integration).

This is done from the Notification channels page.

Note: Alerting is only available in Grafana v4.0 and above.

Add a notification channel

1. In the Grafana side bar, hover your cursor over the Alerting (bell) icon and then click Notification channels.
2. Click Add channel.
3. Fill out the fields or select options described below.

New notification channel fields

Default (send on all alerts)

• Name - Enter a name for this channel. It will be displayed when users add notifications to alert rules.
• Type - Select the channel type. Refer to the List of supported notifiers for details.
• Default (send on all alerts) - When selected, this option sends a notification on this channel for all alert rules.
• Include Image - See Enable images in notifications for details.
• Disable Resolve Message - When selected, this option disables the resolve message [OK] that is sent when the alerting state returns to false.
• Send reminders - When this option is checked additional notifications (reminders) will be sent for triggered alerts. You can specify how often reminders should be sent using number of seconds (s), minutes (m) or hours (h), for example 30s, 3m, 5m or 1h.

Important: Alert reminders are sent after rules are evaluated. Therefore a reminder can never be sent more frequently than a configured alert rule evaluation interval.

These examples show how often and when reminders are sent for a triggered alert.

List of supported notifiers

Email

To enable email notifications you have to setup SMTP settings in the Grafana config. Email notifications will upload an image of the alert graph to an external image destination if available or fallback to attaching the image to the email. Be aware that if you use the local image storage email servers and clients might not be able to access the image.

Slack

To set up Slack, you need to configure an incoming Slack webhook URL. You can follow Sending messages using Incoming Webhooks on how to do that. If you want to include screenshots of the firing alerts in the Slack messages you have to configure either the external image destination in Grafana or a bot integration via Slack Apps. Follow Slack’s guide to set up a bot integration and use the token provided (https://api.slack.com/bot-users), which starts with “xoxb”.

If you are using the token for a slack bot, then you have to invite the bot to the channel you want to send notifications and add the channel to the recipient field.

PagerDuty

To set up PagerDuty, all you have to do is to provide an integration key.

Note: The tags Severity, Class, Group, and Component have special meaning in the Pagerduty Common Event Format - PD-CEF. If an alert panel defines these tag keys, then they are transposed to the root of the event sent to Pagerduty. This means they will be available within the Pagerduty UI and Filtering tools. A Severity tag set on an alert overrides the global Severity set on the notification channel if it’s a valid level.

Webhook

The webhook notification is a simple way to send information about a state change over HTTP to a custom endpoint. Using this notification you could integrate Grafana into a system of your choosing.

Example json body:

json Copy

{
  "dashboardId":1,
  "evalMatches":[
    {
      "value":1,
      "metric":"Count",
      "tags":{}
    }
  ],
  "imageUrl":"https://grafana.com/assets/img/blog/mixed_styles.png",
  "message":"Notification Message",
  "orgId":1,
  "panelId":2,
  "ruleId":1,
  "ruleName":"Panel Title alert",
  "ruleUrl":"http://localhost:3000/d/hZ7BuVbWz/test-dashboard?fullscreen\u0026edit\u0026tab=alert\u0026panelId=2\u0026orgId=1",
  "state":"alerting",
  "tags":{
    "tag name":"tag value"
  },
  "title":"[Alerting] Panel Title alert"
}

• state - The possible values for alert state are: ok, paused, alerting, pending, no_data.

DingDing/DingTalk

Instructions in Chinese.

In DingTalk PC Client:

1. Click “more” icon on upper right of the panel.

2. Click “Robot Manage” item in the pop menu, there will be a new panel call “Robot Manage”.

3. In the “Robot Manage” panel, select “customized: customized robot with Webhook”.

4. In the next new panel named “robot detail”, click “Add” button.

5. In “Add Robot” panel, input a nickname for the robot and select a “message group” which the robot will join in. click “next”.

6. There will be a Webhook URL in the panel, looks like this: https://oapi.dingtalk.com/robot/send?access_token=xxxxxxxxx. Copy this URL to the grafana Dingtalk setting page and then click “finish”.

Dingtalk supports the following “message type”: text, link and markdown. Only the link message type is supported.

Kafka

Notifications can be sent to a Kafka topic from Grafana using the Kafka REST Proxy. There are a couple of configuration options which need to be set up in Grafana UI under Kafka Settings:

1. Kafka REST Proxy endpoint.

2. Kafka Topic.

Once these two properties are set, you can send the alerts to Kafka for further processing or throttling.

Google Hangouts Chat

Notifications can be sent by setting up an incoming webhook in Google Hangouts chat. Configuring such a webhook is described here.

Squadcast

Squadcast helps you get alerted via Phone call, SMS, Email and Push notifications and lets you take actions on those alerts. Grafana notifications can be sent to Squadcast via a simple incoming webhook. Refer the official Squadcast support documentation for configuring these webhooks.

Enable images in notifications

Grafana can render the panel associated with the alert rule as a PNG image and include that in the notification. Read more about the requirements and how to configure image rendering.

Most Notification Channels require that this image be publicly accessible (Slack and PagerDuty for example). In order to include images in alert notifications, Grafana can upload the image to an image store. It currently supports Amazon S3, Webdav, Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage. So to set that up you need to configure the external image uploader in your grafana-server ini config file.

Be aware that some notifiers require public access to the image to be able to include it in the notification. So make sure to enable public access to the images. If you’re using local image uploader, your Grafana instance need to be accessible by the internet.

Notification services which need public image access are marked as ’external only'.

Configure the link back to Grafana from alert notifications

All alert notifications contain a link back to the triggered alert in the Grafana instance. This URL is based on the domain setting in Grafana.