---
title: "Add a notification policy | Grafana Labs"
description: "Learn how to add a notification policy to control how your alerts are routed to contact points."
---

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

# Add a notification policy

A notification policy controls how alerts are routed to contact points. It matches on alert labels to decide which contact point receives each notification. The policy tree starts with a default route, and you can add nested policies for more specific routing.

To add a notification policy, complete the following steps:

1. Add the following to your `alerts.tf` file:
   
   hcl ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy
   
   ```hcl
   resource "grafana_notification_policy" "main" {
     contact_point   = grafana_contact_point.email_alerts.name
     group_by        = ["alertname"]
     group_wait      = "30s"
     group_interval  = "5m"
     repeat_interval = "4h"
   }
   ```
   
   This configuration:
   
   - Sets the default contact point to your email contact point
   - Groups alerts by their name so related alerts are batched together
   - Waits 30 seconds before sending the first notification (to batch related alerts)
   - Sends grouped notifications every 5 minutes while the alert is active
   - Repeats notifications every 4 hours

> **Note:** The `grafana_notification_policy` resource manages the entire notification policy tree for your Grafana instance. If you already have a custom policy tree configured, this resource will replace it. Use `disable_provenance = true` if you want to allow UI edits alongside Terraform management.

## Adding label-based routing

To route specific alerts to different contact points, add nested policies with matchers:

hcl ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy

```hcl
resource "grafana_notification_policy" "main" {
  contact_point = grafana_contact_point.email_alerts.name
  group_by      = ["alertname"]

  policy {
    matcher {
      label = "severity"
      match = "="
      value = "critical"
    }
    contact_point = grafana_contact_point.pagerduty.name
  }
}
```

This routes alerts with `severity = "critical"` to PagerDuty, while all other alerts go to the default email contact point.

In the next milestone, you preview your deployment with `terraform plan`.