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DocumentationGrafana documentationAlertsLegacy Grafana Alerts

Legacy Grafana alerts

Grafana alerting is enabled by default for new OSS installations. For older installations, it is still an opt-in feature.

Note: Legacy dashboard alerts are deprecated and will be removed in Grafana 9. We encourage you to migrate to Grafana alerting for all existing installations.

Legacy dashboard alerts have two main components:

• Alert rule - When the alert is triggered. Alert rules are defined by one or more conditions that are regularly evaluated by Grafana.
• Notification channel - How the alert is delivered. When the conditions of an alert rule are met, the Grafana notifies the channels configured for that alert.

Alert tasks

You can perform the following tasks for alerts:

• Create an alert rule
• View existing alert rules and their current state
• Test alert rules and troubleshoot
• Add or edit an alert contact point

Clustering

The current alerting system doesn’t support high availability. Alert notifications are not deduplicated and load balancing is not supported between instances; for example, silences from one instance will not appear in the other.

Alert evaluation

Grafana managed alerts are evaluated by the Grafana backend. Rule evaluations are scheduled, according to the alert rule configuration, and queries are evaluated by an engine that is part of core Grafana.

Alerting rules can only query backend data sources with alerting enabled:

• builtin or developed and maintained by grafana: Graphite, Prometheus, Loki, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, Google Cloud Monitoring, Cloudwatch, Azure Monitor, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, OpenTSDB, Oracle, and Azure Data Explorer
• any community backend data sources with alerting enabled (backend and alerting properties are set in the plugin.json)

Metrics from the alerting engine

The alerting engine publishes some internal metrics about itself. You can read more about how Grafana publishes internal metrics. See also, View alert rules and their current state.