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Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

Grafana Cloud Enterprise Open source

Alert rule types

Grafana supports several alert rule types, the following sections will explain their merits and demerits and help you choose the right alert type for your use case.

Grafana managed rules

Grafana-managed rules are the most flexible alert rule type. They allow you to create alerts that can act on data from any of your existing data sources.

In addition to supporting any data source, you can add expressions to transform your data and express alert conditions.

Mimir, Loki and Cortex rules

To create Mimir, Loki or Cortex alerts you must have a compatible Prometheus data source. You can check if your data source is compatible by testing the data source and checking the details if the ruler API is supported.

Successfully connected to a Mimir Prometheus datasource
Successfully connected to a Mimir Prometheus datasource

Recording rules

Recording rules are only available for compatible Prometheus data sources like Mimir, Loki and Cortex.

A recording rule allows you to save an expression’s result to a new set of time series. This is useful if you want to run alerts on aggregated data or if you have dashboards that query the same expression repeatedly.

Read more about recording rules in Prometheus.