Grafana has become the de facto standard for visualizing metrics and logs from various data sources like Prometheus, Elasticsearch, and others. While default alerting features provide a good starting point, custom alert rules enable intermediate and advanced users to tailor monitoring solutions to complex environments. This post dives deep into building custom Grafana alerts with advanced rule configurations and integrating them with incident management systems such as PagerDuty, OpsGenie, and VictorOps.

Why Build Custom Alerts in Grafana

Out-of-the-box Grafana alerts are powerful but can be limiting when:

  • Monitoring complex thresholds involving multiple metrics and conditions
  • Needing dynamic alert evaluation windows or multi-dimensional queries
  • Integrating tightly with incident management workflows to automate escalation and on-call rotations

Custom alert rules provide granular control over alert logic, notification channels, and escalation policies, allowing teams to reduce alert fatigue and improve incident response times.

Designing Advanced Alert Rules in Grafana

Grafana’s alerting supports expression-based queries and multi-condition rules. Here’s how to leverage these features:

  1. Use PromQL and Elasticsearch Queries for Complex Logic
    For Prometheus data sources, use PromQL expressions combining multiple metrics with and, or, and mathematical functions. For Elasticsearch, utilize Lucene query syntax and aggregation pipelines to detect anomalies or threshold breaches.

  2. Leverage Alert Rule Expressions
    Grafana allows combining multiple query results using AND/OR logic in alert rule expressions. This is useful to build composite alerts, e.g., triggering an alert only if CPU usage is high and disk I/O is above a threshold.

  3. Set Dynamic Evaluation Intervals and For Durations
    Define how frequently alerts are evaluated and how long a condition must persist before firing. This avoids false positives caused by transient spikes.

  4. Use Variables and Template Queries
    Make alerts reusable by using dashboard variables in query expressions. This is especially helpful in multi-tenant environments or when monitoring multiple clusters.

Integrating Grafana Alerts with Incident Management Systems

The power of Grafana alerts is unlocked when combined with incident management platforms to automate alert routing and escalation.

  1. Webhook Notifications
    Grafana supports sending alert notifications via webhooks. Most incident management tools provide webhook endpoints that accept alert payloads to create or update incidents. Configure JSON templates in Grafana to customize the payload for each system.

  2. Native Integrations
    Grafana offers built-in integrations with popular platforms like PagerDuty, OpsGenie, VictorOps, and Microsoft Teams. These integrations allow you to:

    • Automatically create incidents on alert triggers
    • Attach alert details and relevant dashboard links
    • Control escalation policies and on-call schedules directly via the incident platform

  3. Using Alertmanager with Prometheus
    For Prometheus users, integrating Grafana alerting with Prometheus Alertmanager adds advanced routing, grouping, and inhibition capabilities. Alertmanager can then forward alerts to multiple incident management systems, providing a centralized alert dispatching layer.

Best Practices for Building Reliable Custom Alerts

  • Test Alert Logic Thoroughly
    Use the “Test Rule” feature in Grafana to simulate alert conditions and verify expected behavior before enabling alerts in production.

  • Minimize Alert Noise
    Adjust thresholds and evaluation intervals to reduce false positives. Use multi-metric conditions and anomaly detection where possible.

  • Include Contextual Data
    Enrich alert notifications with relevant dashboard links, logs, and runbook URLs to speed up incident resolution.

  • Leverage Alert Annotations
    Annotate Grafana dashboards with alert state changes to visualize alert history alongside metric trends.

  • Use Tags and Labels Consistently
    Consistent tagging helps in filtering alerts by service, environment, or severity in the incident management system.

Example: Configuring a Multi-Condition Alert with PagerDuty Integration

Suppose you want to alert when both CPU utilization exceeds 80% and memory usage exceeds 75% for more than 5 minutes.

  1. Create two Prometheus queries in Grafana for CPU and memory metrics.
  2. Define an alert rule expression combining both queries with AND logic.
  3. Set the evaluation interval to 1 minute and the For duration to 5 minutes.
  4. Configure the notification channel as PagerDuty using Grafana’s native integration.
  5. Customize the PagerDuty payload to include service name, severity, and dashboard URL.

This setup ensures that PagerDuty receives only meaningful alerts and routes them to the appropriate on-call engineer.

Conclusion

Building custom Grafana alerts with advanced rule configurations and integrating them with incident management systems elevates your monitoring strategy. It empowers DevOps and SRE teams to detect critical issues faster, reduce alert fatigue, and streamline incident response workflows. By mastering multi-condition alerts, dynamic query expressions, and leveraging native integrations or webhooks, you can create a resilient observability stack tailored to your infrastructure’s unique demands.

Start experimenting with advanced alert rules today and transform your Grafana dashboards into powerful, proactive monitoring hubs!