---
title: "Connect Grafana Alerting as an integration | Grafana Labs"
description: "Add Grafana Alerting as your first integration and test alert creation to verify the connection."
---

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

# Connect Grafana Alerting as an integration

In this milestone, you connect the Grafana Alerting integration for IRM. This integration is the foundation of your IRM setup. It allows you to send Grafana Cloud alert rules to IRM for automatic grouping, routing, escalation, and notification.

To add Grafana Alerting as an integration, complete the following steps:

1. Sign in to your Grafana Cloud environment, for example mystack.grafana.net.
2. From the Grafana Cloud main menu, navigate to **Alerts & IRM** → **IRM**.
3. In the IRM navigation menu, click **Integrations**.
4. Click **+ Add integration**.
5. Select **Grafana Alerting** from the list.
6. In **Integration name**, enter a descriptive name (for example, `Production SRE alerts`).
7. (Optional) Add a description (for example, `Production alert rules from Grafana Alerting`).
8. Choose **Connect existing Contact point** or **Create a new one** (auto-creates in Grafana Alerting).
9. Click **Create Integration**.

The integration is now created in IRM. Alert rules can’t create Alert groups in IRM until you assign the IRM contact point to those rules. You complete this in a later step. For now, continue by defining an escalation chain.

In the next milestone, you create an escalation chain to define how Alert groups are routed to responders.