---
title: "Alert on your data | Grafana Labs"
description: "Create alert rules on a connected data source"
---

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

## Alert on your data

You can alert on a connected data source using Grafana-managed alerting. A Grafana-managed alert rule runs a query against your data source on a schedule and fires when a condition is met, for example when error rate stays above a threshold.

[An alert rule queries a data source on a schedule and fires when a condition is met. The rule defines when something is wrong; a contact point defines who gets notified.](alert-pipeline.svg "An alert rule queries a data source on a schedule and fires when a condition is met. The rule defines when something is wrong; a contact point defines who gets notified.")

## Two things to know

| Consideration                            | Detail                                                                                                                                                         |
|------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| **Not every source supports alerting**   | A data source must support alerting to be used in a rule. Common sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, CloudWatch, InfluxDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL do. |
| **Rules and notifications are separate** | A rule defines *when* something is wrong. To control *who* gets notified, set up contact points and notification policies in **Alerts & IRM**.             |

> **Key insight:** Alerting works on data in place. You don’t have to move your data to Grafana Cloud to alert on it.

## Create your first alert rule

Ready to set one up? This hands-on learning path builds the alert query in one of these:

- Prometheus or Mimir (for metrics)
- Loki (for logs)

The concepts apply to any alerting-capable data source, but if you connected a different one, you must write the query in that source’s own query language.

Learning path

#### Create infrastructure alerts

Learn how to create alert rules for your infrastructure metrics and logs in Grafana Cloud.

20 min

Beginner

Docs & blog posts

#### Open in Grafana Cloud

Complete this learning path directly in your Grafana Cloud stack, or in the Grafana Play stack, with an interactive learning experience.

[Open in Grafana Cloud]() [Try in Grafana Play]()

[View on website](/docs/learning-paths/infrastructure-alerting/)