Grafana v11.3: how to trigger Alert when app version changes?

Grafana Dashboards
1

Our app sends telemetry data to Elasticsearch.

One of the available keys there is “client_version” and its value is a string like “24.0.03” or “10.00.001”

In a time series graph which shows various app performance metric data, I want to automatically add an annotation whenever the app is upgraded to a newer version.

I tried to implement it via Grafana’s alerting but the alert rules there insist on comparing numeric values only. In my lab i converted the string values of “client_version” key to integers, but I still cannot make a reasonable comparison as the list of available expressions there does not meet my needs (as far as i checked, there is no ability to compare the latest value of “client_version” with the value that was recorded lets say 1 hour ago.

Before i jump into Elasticsearch and try to find a solution there, can you confirm that such a comparison is indeed impossible in Grafana?

2

Yep, I think that’s correct.

Sounds like you are going to look for a solution in Elasticsearch, but if you are not successful or it gets too messy, I think this can easily be done in Node-RED (see example 2 in this post). From there, I would just create something that takes any value that passes by the filter node and convert that message into a 1 or 0, and have Grafana alert on that.