Hey everyone! My name is Marie Cruz, and I’m a
Senior Developer Advocate here at Grafana Labs. In this quick video tutorial, I’ll show you how you
can use the alert list visualization in Grafana. To understand how an alert list works, you first
need to understand the concepts of alerting. In a nutshell, alerting is a process that's
designed to notify individuals or systems about certain events or conditions that
require immediate attention or action. In Grafana, the alerting
feature periodically queries your data source and evaluates the
condition defined in an alert rule. An alert rule is simply an evaluation
criteria for when an alert should fire. If the condition defined in the alert rule is met, Grafana can trigger notifications to alert you
and your team about potential issues or anomalies. You can also link an alert to a dashboard panel, which I've explained in this video and it's
also added in the video description below. But, what if you want to display a list of
important alerts that you want to track as a different dashboard panel? This is where
an alert list visualization can help. An alert lists allow you to display a list of
important alerts that you want to keep track of rather than navigating to different alert rules
manually. Every time your dashboard reloads, the alert list is also reloaded meaning you always
get the most up-to-date results for your alerts. With that explanation out of the way, let’s see how you can configure the
alert list visualization in Grafana. I have an existing panel created already,
using the time series visualization, which monitors the traffic that’s coming to
this example application called Grafana news. In order to use the alert list visualization, you
need to configure the alerting feature in Grafana so let’s create an alert rule first. To set this
up, I’m going to click the Grafana menu icon here, navigate to alerting, and then click alert rules.
Now, let’s create a new alert rule, and I’m going to give my alert rule a name. I’m going to use the
same PromQL query as my time-series visualization. Now, let’s scroll down, and
under the expressions section, I’m going to keep the default values
for simplicity. If I quickly preview these expressions, you can see that one
of the alert rule state is set to firing. So now, I’m going to just provide a folder where
the alert rule will be stored. I’m also going to create an evaluation group and I’m going to
set my evaluation interval to 10 seconds, which is how often the alert rule should
be evaluated. I’ll also update the pending period to 0 because I want the
alert to fire immediately for this tutorial Let’s go ahead and click save rule and exit. I’m going to create another alert rule just so we can simulate having more than
one alert in our alert list. Now, let’s go back to our dashboard, add a new
visualization, and change our visualization type to an alert list. You should see the
alert rules that we have recently created. Expanding each of the alerts provides
you with more details and you can also view the alert rule directly from the list. Over to this side, you can see all the
alert list options that you can configure. By default, Grafana displays your
alerts as a list, but you can also view them as a stat or a single number.
I’ll leave it as a list for this tutorial. You can also choose how you want to group your
alerts. You can group them by the alert name or by their folder. You can also choose to just
display alerts that are linked to this dashboard. You can also use some filtering
options, such as by text, label, data source, or folder. Let’s say, for
example, that you only want alerts with specific labels displayed. I’ll update one of
the alert rules and add an additional label. Going back to the alert list, let’s add the label that I have added to filter out
the alert rule with this label. And finally, you can also configure the alert
list to filter out the state of your alert, such as firing, pending, or normal. And there you have it! In this beginner-friendly
video tutorial, I’ve shown you how you can configure an alert list visualization in Grafana
and the different ways that you can configure it. Check out our documentation if you want to
know more about alert list visualization, which you can find in the video description below. I hope you found this video useful. If you do, let us know in the comments, and
as always, happy visualizing!
