Plan for alert rules

Before you begin the alert rules creation process, it’s essential to plan your alerting strategy to ensure you receive meaningful notifications without overwhelming your team. Effective alert planning helps you focus on critical issues and reduces alert fatigue.

When planning for alert rules, consider the following key elements:

Identify critical metrics

Choose metrics that directly indicate problems affecting your users or business operations. Focus on symptoms rather than causes to create actionable alerts.

Examples of critical metrics include:

• Application performance: Response time, error rate, throughput
• Infrastructure health: CPU usage, memory consumption, disk space
• Service availability: Uptime, connectivity, dependency health

Set appropriate thresholds

Define thresholds that balance sensitivity with specificity. Thresholds should be high enough to avoid false positives but low enough to catch real issues early.

Consider these threshold strategies:

• Static thresholds: Fixed values based on known capacity limits or SLA requirements
• Dynamic thresholds: Values that adapt based on historical data patterns
• Percentage-based thresholds: Relative changes that indicate anomalies

Define evaluation windows

Choose evaluation periods that provide sufficient data for reliable alerting while maintaining responsiveness to real issues.

Plan notification routing

Determine who should receive alerts and which channels to route them through based on severity, time of day, and escalation policies.

To plan effective alert rules, it is useful to work with your team and discuss the following:

1. Identify the specific metrics you want to monitor from your existing dashboards.

2. Determine the threshold values that indicate problems in your specific environment.

   For example, if monitoring CPU usage, you might set a threshold of 80% for warning alerts and 95% for critical alerts.

3. Decide on the evaluation period for your alerts.

   For example, you might evaluate CPU usage over a 5-minute window to avoid false positives from brief spikes.

4. Plan your notification strategy including contact points and escalation policies.

   For example, send critical alerts to your on-call team with Grafana IRM and warning alerts to your team chat channel.

In the next milestone, you’ll learn how to navigate from a dashboard visualization to create an alert rule.

More to explore (optional)

For a deeper look at alert metrics and best practices, the Grafana alerting documentation has best practices documentation that provides in-depth commentary and examples of how to create highly informative alerts in Grafana:

Best practives: Multi-dimensional alerts in Grafana