---
title: "How alerting works | Grafana Labs"
description: "The five-step flow from creating a rule to a firing alert and the resolved notification that follows."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

## How alerting works

The following diagram shows the five-step alerting flow.

[Diagram showing the five-step Grafana Alerting flow](alerting-flow.svg "Diagram showing the five-step Grafana Alerting flow")

Grafana Alerting monitors your data and notifies you when something needs attention. Here is the five-step flow:

| Step | What happens                                                               |
|------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| 1    | You create a rule that defines what data to watch and when to alert        |
| 2    | Grafana checks the rule at regular intervals                               |
| 3    | If the problem persists long enough, the alert fires                       |
| 4    | A notification is sent to a destination you configure (email, Slack, etc.) |
| 5    | When the problem clears, a “resolved” notification follows                 |

## What you’ll build in this journey

By the end of this journey, you’ll have a working alert rule and a deeper understanding of how the alerting process functions in Grafana.