8.2.2 - enabling alerts? Doc help is confusing

Running grafana 8.2.2. I’d like to try out alerts but get lost in the documentation. The [Alerting | Grafana documentation](https://Overview of Grafana 8 alerting) say that, starting with 8.0, it is available and an opt-in feature. The ‘opt-in’ text links to https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/alerting/unified-alerting/opt-in/ which states:

To enable Grafana 8 alerts:

  1. In your custom configuration file ($WORKING_DIR/conf/custom.ini), go to the unified alerts section.

I installed grafana cleanly a week ago on a ubuntu 20.04 server. Grafana is 8.2.2. My /etc/grafana/grafana.ini file has no section called [unified_alerting]. There’s a section called [alerting] but this doesn’t have the same subsections. In fact, I can’t find any reference to this [unified_alerting] anywhere else or what it should look like.

I found mention that ‘unified alerting’ is, as of June 2021, a new feature to be released in an upcoming minor release, but I can’t find out more than that. Has it been released? If not, why does all the online documentation refer to it? And where is the documentation for the existing, released, alerting system? I don’t care about whether I’m using tomorrow’s or yesterday’s alerts; I just want to use some!

how exactly did you install 8.2.2? Using apt or did you manually get the deb package?

or manually install a standalone binary?

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maybe you are running from the RPM install?

whatever your main config is (missing your [unified_alerting] section)…copy the [unified_alerting] from /usr/share/grafana/conf/defaults.ini and paste it into your config.

enabled = true under unified_alerting section like it says.
enabled = false under alerting section despite it claiming true

restart grafana service

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