Deploy an alert rule with Terraform

Welcome to the learning path that shows you how to deploy a complete Grafana alerting pipeline using the Grafana Terraform provider. You’ll define an alert rule group, a contact point, and a notification policy in HCL, then deploy them with Terraform’s plan-and-apply workflow.

The Grafana Terraform provider lets you manage alerting resources alongside your other infrastructure. Same tool, same state management, same deployment process.

Here’s what to expect

When you complete this journey, you’ll be able to:

• Create a Grafana service account token for Terraform authentication
• Configure the Grafana Terraform provider
• Define a grafana_folder to organize alert rules
• Define a grafana_rule_group with a working alert rule
• Define a grafana_contact_point for notifications
• Define a grafana_notification_policy to route alerts
• Run terraform plan to preview changes before applying
• Run terraform apply to deploy the full alerting pipeline to Grafana

Before you begin

Before you deploy an alert rule with Terraform, ensure you have:

• A Grafana Cloud account or self-managed Grafana instance (version 12 or higher)
• Terraform installed (version 1.0 or later)
• A data source configured in Grafana (for example, Prometheus or Grafana TestData)
• Admin or Editor permissions on your Grafana instance

Troubleshooting

If you get stuck, we’ve got your back! Where appropriate, troubleshooting information is just a click away.

More to explore

We understand you might want to explore other capabilities not strictly on this path. We’ll provide you opportunities where it makes sense.