# Alerting Engine - Custom datasource?

**URL:** <https://community.grafana.com/t/alerting-engine-custom-datasource/946>\
**Category:** General\
**Created:** [May 16, 2017, 11:05am UTC](https://community.grafana.com/t/alerting-engine-custom-datasource/946 "2017-05-16T11:05:45Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![philsmith](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/d78d45/32.png) [@philsmith](https://community.grafana.com/u/philsmith)\
**Post date:** [May 16, 2017, 11:05am UTC](https://community.grafana.com/t/alerting-engine-custom-datasource/946/1 "2017-05-16T11:05:45Z")

</div>

Currenlty the docs state that [alerts](http://docs.grafana.org/alerting/rules/) only work with some specific datasources. We’d like alerts to work with our datasource that we’re writing a custom plugin for. Is this possible out of the box or with our own development effort?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![daniellee](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/grafana/user_avatar/community.grafana.com/daniellee/32/41_2.png) [@daniellee](https://community.grafana.com/u/daniellee)\
**Post date:** [May 16, 2017, 12:26pm UTC](https://community.grafana.com/t/alerting-engine-custom-datasource/946/2 "2017-05-16T12:26:29Z")

</div>

It is not currently possible.

For a data source to support alerting, it has to be implemented on Grafana backend. Grafana does not yet have support for backend plugins (although it’s on the [roadmap](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/master/ROADMAP.md)). This means for a custom data source to support alerting, it would have to be included in Grafana core.

Alerting support for custom plugins will be possible when [support for backend plugins](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/6841) has been implemented.