Documentation for automated readers
A curated documentation index is available at: https://grafana.com/llms.txt

A complete documentation index is available at: https://grafana.com/llms-full.txt
These indexes can help with page discovery before fetching individual documents.

This page is also available in Markdown, which may be easier for automated readers and AI tools to parse than HTML. The Markdown version is available at https://grafana.com/docs/learning-paths/alerting-query-language/build-query.md, or by sending Accept: text/markdown to https://grafana.com/docs/learning-paths/alerting-query-language/build-query/. For broader documentation discovery, the curated index is available at https://grafana.com/llms.txt and the complete index is available at https://grafana.com/llms-full.txt.

Documentation Learning paths First alert rule with query language Build query

Page 5 of 12

First alert rule with query language

14 min

Milestone 1

Why query language

2 min

Milestone 2

Install QuickPizza

1 min

Milestone 3

Name your rule

1 min

Milestone 4

Build query

1 min

Milestone 5

Set condition

1 min

Milestone 6

Folder and labels

1 min

Milestone 7

Evaluation behavior

1 min

Milestone 8

Handling

1 min

Milestone 10

Notify and save

1 min

Milestone 11

Create silence

1 min

Milestone 12

Complete

1 min

Write your query in Code mode

Your alert watches how often QuickPizza’s server fails. You want it to fire when more than 5 in every 100 requests fail.

You switch to Code and write PromQL so the full ratio is one clear expression.

What the query does:

• quickpizza_server_http_requests_total counts every request.
• rate(...[5m]) converts that count to a per-second rate over 5 minutes.
• {status=~"5.."} keeps only 5xx failures.
• Dividing failed by all requests, then multiplying by 100, gives a percentage.

1. Choose grafanacloud-play-prom as the data source.

2. Click Code on the mode toggle.

4. Click Run queries.

The query reports QuickPizza’s error rate as a percentage. Next, you set the threshold and recovery while you’re still in this section.

---

Name your rule

page 5 of 12

Set condition

page 5 of 12