Grafana Cloud Alerting

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:42:02 +0000

Grafana Cloud Alerting

Grafana Cloud Alerting allows you to create and manage all of your Prometheus-style alerting rules, for both Prometheus metrics and Loki log data. With this feature, you don’t need to leave Grafana, upload or edit configuration files, or install additional tools.

Permissions

All members of an organization that have alerts set up can view alerts in Grafana Cloud Alerting. This includes everyone with a Viewer, Editor, or Admin role.

Users with the organization Admin role can also create, edit, or delete alerts.

Data sources

Grafana Cloud Alerting supports rule management across multiple data sources, for both metrics and logs, across all of the stacks in your org. If you have more than one Prometheus or Loki data source, there will be a dropdown at the top for you to select the data source to configure rules.

Note
Pay attention to which data source you select. Cloud alerts are tied to a specific data source. For example, if you have a Loki data source selected you will not be able to create an alert based on a Prometheus data source.

Alerts and recording rules

Prometheus supports two types of rules:

Recording rules - Recording rules allow you to execute expressions or queries, by saving them off as a stored rule instead.
Alerting rules - Alerting rules allow you to define alert conditions and to route those notifications to an external service. An alert fires if metrics meet criteria defined in the alerting rule.

Both of these rules are configurable from the Grafana Cloud Alerting interface and configured in the same way.

Alert states

Alert states are identical to the standard format found in Prometheus rule configurations. In Grafana Cloud Alerting, each individual alert is highlighted by its state to more clearly distinguish between alerts.

Firing - Alerts that have been active for longer than the configured threshold. Alerts are highlighted in red and tagged with a red firing label.
Pending - Alerts that have been active for less than the configured threshold. Alerts are highlighted in orange.
Inactive - Alerts that are neither firing nor pending. Alerts are highlighted in green.

Notifications

The Notifications tab is where you can view all current notifications and sort them by various states, receivers, and labels.

Limits

There is a limit on how many rules can be created in a rule group. There is also a limit on how many rule groups can be created.

You can create:

20 rules per rule group
35 rule groups

It is possible to increase these limits. Please contact customer support for further information.

If you exceed the limits, you will encounter an error similar to this:

ERROR[0000] requests failed fields.msg="request failed with response body
per-user rules per rule group limit (limit: 20 actual: 22) exceeded\n"
status="400 Bad Request"
ERROR[0000] unable to load rule group  error="failed request to the cortex api"
group=limit_rules_per_group namespace=test

To increase the number of rules or rule groups you can configure, contact support to upgrade your account.

Prometheus rules with mimirtool

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:42:02 +0000

Prometheus rules with mimirtool

This page outlines the steps to use mimirtool and Prometheus-style rules with Grafana Cloud Alerting. You can load Prometheus alerting and recording rules that are evaluated entirely in Grafana Cloud. This allows for global rule evaluation over all of the metrics and logs stored in your Grafana Cloud stack.

Note
mimirtool does not support Loki.

Prometheus-style alerting is driven by your Grafana Cloud Metrics, Grafana Cloud Logs, and Grafana Cloud Alerts instances. The Metrics and Logs instance holds the rules definition, while the Alerts instance is in charge of routing and managing the alerts that fire from the Metrics and Logs instance. These are separate systems that must be individually configured in order for alerting to work correctly.

The following sections cover all of these concepts:

How to upload alerting and recording rules definition to your Grafana Cloud Metrics instance
How to upload alerting rules definition to your Grafana Cloud Logs instance
How to configure an Alertmanager for your Grafana Cloud Alerts instance, giving you access to the Alertmanager UI.

Note: You need an API key with proper permissions. You can use the same API key for your Metric, Log, and Alerting instances.

Download and install mimirtool

mimirtool is a powerful command-line tool for interacting with Mimir, which powers Grafana Cloud Metrics and Alerts. You’ll use mimirtool to upload your metric and log rules definition and the Alertmanager configuration using YAML files.

For more information, including installation instructions, see Grafana Mimirtool.

Note
For mimirtool to interact with Grafana Cloud, you must set the correct configuration variables. Set them using either environment variables or a command line flags.

Upload rules definition to your Grafana Cloud Metrics and Logs instance

First, you’ll need to upload your alerting and recording rules to your Metrics and Logs instance. You’ll need the instance ID and the URL. These should be part of /orgs/<yourOrgName>/.

Metrics instance

Your Metrics instance is likely to be in the us-central1 region. Its address would be in the form of https://prometheus-us-central1.grafana.net.

Logs instance

Your Logs instance is likely to be in the us-central1 region. Its address would be in the form of https://logs-prod-us-central1.grafana.net.

Using mimirtool

With your instance ID, URL, and API key you’re now ready to upload your rules to your metrics instance. Use the following commands and files as a reference.

Below is an example alert and rule definition YAML file. Take note of the namespace key which replaces the concept of “files” in this context given each instance only supports 1 configuration file.

# first_rules.yml
namespace: 'first_rules'
groups:
  - name: 'shopping_service_rules_and_alerts'
    rules:
      - alert: 'PromScrapeFailed'
        annotations:
          message: 'Prometheus failed to scrape a target {{ $labels.job }}  / {{ $labels.instance }}'
        expr: 'up != 1'
        for: '1m'
        labels:
          'severity': 'critical'
      - record: 'job:up:sum'
        expr: 'sum by(job) (up)'

Although both recording and alerting rules are defined under the key rules the difference between a rule and and alert is generally (as there are others) whenever the key record or alert is defined.

With this file, you can run the following commands to upload your rules file in your Metrics or Logs instance. Keep in mind that these are example commands for your Metrics instance, and they use placeholders and command line flags. Follow a similar pattern for your Logs instances by switching the address to the correct one. The examples also assume that files are located in the same directory.

$ mimirtool rules load first_rules.yml \
--address=https://prometheus-us-central1.grafana.net \
--id=<yourID> \
--key=<yourKey>

Next, confirm that the rules were uploaded correctly by running:

$ mimirtool rules list \
--address=https://prometheus-us-central1.grafana.net \
--id=<yourID> \
--key=<yourKey>

Output is a list that shows you all the namespaces and rule groups for your instance ID:

Namespace   | Rule Group
first_rules | shopping_service_rules_and_alerts

You can also print the rules:

$ mimirtool rules print \
--address=https://prometheus-us-central1.grafana.net \
--id=<yourID> \
--key=<yourKey>

Output from the print command should look like this:

first_rules:
  - name: shopping_service_rules_and_alerts
    interval: 0s
    rules:
      - alert: PromScrapeFailed
        expr: up != 1
        for: 1m
        labels:
          severity: critical
        annotations:
          message: Prometheus failed to scrape a target {{ $labels.job }}  / {{ $labels.instance }}
      - record: job:up:sum
        expr: sum by(job) (up)

Upload Alertmanager configuration to your Grafana Cloud Alerts instance

To receive alerts you’ll need to upload your Alertmanager configuration to your Grafana Cloud Alerts instance. Similar to the previous step, you’ll need the corresponding instance ID, URL and API key. These should be part of /orgs/<yourOrgName>/.

Your Alerts instance is likely to be in the us-central1 region. Its address would be in the form of https://alertmanager-us-central1.grafana.net.

Using mimirtool

With your instance ID, URL, and API key you’re now ready to upload your Alertmanager configuration to your Alerts instance. Use the following commands and files as a reference.

Ultimately, you’ll need to write your own or adapt an example config file for alerts to be delivered.

Below is an example Alertmanager configuration. Please take that this not a working configuration, your alerts won’t be delivered with the following configuration but your Alertmanager UI will be accessible.

# alertmanager.yml
global:
  smtp_smarthost: 'localhost:25'
  smtp_from: 'youraddress@example.org'
route:
  receiver: example-email
receivers:
  - name: example-email
    email_configs:
      - to: 'youraddress@example.org'

With this file, you can run the following commands to upload your Alertmanager configuration in your Alerts instance.

$ mimirtool alertmanager load alertmanager.yml \
--address=https://alertmanager-us-central1.grafana.net \
--id=<yourID> \
--key=<yourKey>

Then, confirm that the rules were uploaded correctly by running:

$ mimirtool alertmanager get \
--address=https://alertmanager-us-central1.grafana.net \
--id=<yourID> \
--key=<yourKey>

You should see output similar to the following:

global:
  smtp_smarthost: 'localhost:25'
  smtp_from: 'youraddress@example.org'
route:
  receiver: example-email
receivers:
 - name: example-email
   email_configs:
    - to: 'youraddress@example.org'

Finally, you can delete the configuration with:

$ mimirtool alertmanager delete \
--address=https://alertmanager-us-central1.grafana.net \
--id=<yourID> \
--key=<yourKey>

UI access

After you upload a working Alertmanager configuration file, you can access the Alertmanager UI at: https://alertmanager-us-central1.grafana.net/alertmanager.

Legacy alerting on Grafana Labs

Grafana Cloud Alerting

Grafana Cloud Alerting

Permissions

Data sources

Alerts and recording rules

Alert states

Notifications

Limits

Prometheus rules with mimirtool

Prometheus rules with mimirtool

Download and install mimirtool

Upload rules definition to your Grafana Cloud Metrics and Logs instance

Metrics instance

Logs instance

Using mimirtool

Upload Alertmanager configuration to your Grafana Cloud Alerts instance

Using mimirtool

UI access