The value of Grafana Alerting

Monitoring dashboards are powerful, but they require someone to be watching. When an issue occurs at 3 AM, or during a holiday, or simply when your team is focused elsewhere, problems can go unnoticed until users complain—or worse.

Grafana Alerting transforms your monitoring from passive observation to active notification. Instead of checking dashboards, your dashboards check themselves and tell you when something needs attention. This shift from “data you watch” to “data that watches for you” is the foundation of proactive operations.

Grafana Alerting provides the following advantages over dashboard-only monitoring:

• Proactive notification: Get alerted when thresholds are crossed, not when users report problems.
• Multi-dimensional alerts: One rule can monitor hundreds of hosts, services, or regions—each firing independently.
• Intelligent routing: Route alerts to the right team via the right channel (Slack, PagerDuty, email) based on labels.
• Noise reduction: Evaluation intervals and pending periods filter brief spikes from real incidents.
• Unified experience: Alert on metrics, logs, or any data source from a single alerting system.
• Scale with your infrastructure: As you add hosts and services, multi-dimensional rules automatically include them.

In the next milestone, you’ll learn how to plan effective alert rules before creating them.