Create a Grafana managed alerting rule

    1. In the Grafana menu, click the Alerting (bell) icon to open the Alerting page listing existing alerts.
    2. Click New alert rule.
    3. In Step 1, add the rule name, type, and storage location.
      • In Rule name, add a descriptive name. This name is displayed in the alert rule list. It is also the label for every alert instance that is created from this rule.
      • From the Rule type drop-down, select Grafana managed alert.
    4. In Step 2, add queries and expressions to evaluate.
      • Keep the default name or hover over and click the edit icon to change the name.
      • For queries, select a data source from the drop-down.
      • Add one or more or expressions.
      • For each expression, select either Classic condition to create a single alert rule, or choose from Math, Reduce, Resample options to generate separate alert for each series. For details on these options, see .
      • Click Run queries to verify that the query is successful.
    5. In Step 3, add conditions.

      • From the Condition drop-down, select the query or expression to trigger the alert rule.
      • For Evaluate every, specify the frequency of evaluation. Must be a multiple of 10 seconds. For examples, 1m, 30s.
      • Click Preview alerts to check the result of running the query at this moment. Preview excludes no data and error handling.
    6. In Step 4, add additional metadata associated with the rule.
      • Add a description and summary to customize alert messages. Use the guidelines in Annotations and labels for alerting.
      • Add Runbook URL, panel, dashboard, and alert IDs.
      • Add custom labels.
    7. Click Save to save the rule or Save and exit to save the rule and go back to the Alerting page.

    For Grafana managed alerts, you can create a rule with a classic condition or you can create a multi-dimensional rule.

    Rule with classic condition

    Use the classic condition expression to create a rule that triggers a single alert when its condition is met. For a query that returns multiple series, Grafana does not track the alert state of each series. As a result, Grafana sends only a single alert even when alert conditions are met for multiple series.

    To generate a separate alert for each series, create a multi-dimensional rule. Use Math, Reduce, or expressions to create a multi-dimensional rule. For example:

    • Add a Reduce expression for each query to aggregate values in the selected time range into a single value. (Not needed for rules using numeric data).
    • Add a Math expression with the condition for the rule. Not needed in case a query or a reduce expression already returns 0 if rule should not fire, or a positive number if it should fire. Some examples: $B > 70 if it should fire in case value of B query/expression is more than 70. $B < $C * 100 in case it should fire if value of B is less than value of C multiplied by 100. If queries being compared have multiple series in their results, series from different queries are matched if they have the same labels or one is a subset of the other.

    Rule with classic condition

    For more information, see expressions documentation.

    No data and error handling

    Error or timeout optionDescription
    AlertingSet alert rule state to Alerting
    OKSet alert rule state to Normal
    ErrorCreate a new alert with the name and UID of the alert rule, and UID of the datasource that returned no data as labels.