Feedback: Rename panel alerts to something else

Grafana Alerting
1

There are currently two worlds in Grafana: old alerts linked to panels that show a red/green heart for ease of visual inspection, and the new unified alerting that people are use more for proper monitoring/alerting.

These two worlds are managed in “Alerting > Alert Rules”. I think this is bad because people have to come up with clever naming schemes to differentiate between them.

For example, if I have a panel showing “ElasticSearch query time” and I want some visual aid to show things are broken, I’ll add an alert to that panel without any labels (so no notification policy triggers).

I will certainly have a similar named alert for proper monitoring, that will have labels and will send notifications. I cannot name both of them the same.

I would prefer if “panel alerts” weren’t considered part of unified alerting. If they only existed in the panel’s configuration and never showed in “Alerting > Alert Rules”.

I think this come from the fact that Grafana evolved two major feature sets (dashboards and alerts) in a single product. I have said it a few times, they are clashing.

I’d be fine with “de-evolving” panel alerts into just a mere threshold configuration that must use the same query from the panel itself. Not a separate query like today.

2

Hi! :wave:

Thanks for the feedback!

Just to make sure I understand you, once Grafana Alerting (Unified Alerting) is enabled, panel alerts no longer exist. The old panel-based alerts (which were the default in Grafana 7 and older) are disabled at startup time and the user interface changes too.

When you create an alert from a panel in Grafana Alerting (Unified Alerting) it is exactly the same kind of alert as if you had created it from the Alert Rules page. The only difference is the DashboardUID and PanelID annotations are automatically populated for you. There are no other differences.

Are you saying you would rather alerts created from panels be completely separate from all other alerts created from the Alert Rules page?

If you just want a visual aid on graphs, have you considered using the Thresholds feature instead? You can find it at the bottom of the Panel Options.