How to Alert based on Slope of Metric Graph?

I have an SQS Dead Letter Queue I am trying to alert on.
Grafana is getting the data about this queue from Cloudwatch via the Cloudwatch connector.

The queue’s behavior over the past week looks like this:

I am trying to configure an alert which fires whenever the slope of this queue is not negative.
How would I do that?

I saw this post before which uses the diff() operator in the expression but that approach doesn’t seem possible anymore in Grafana 9 (I can’t make the query a range, I can only select the series “A”)

I use InfluxDB and have a similar need and found this to be perfect.

What if I don’t use InfluxDB? Is it possible to do something like rate based alerting using Math expressions?

I do not think the built in math functions in Grafana allow one to alert on the rate of change (slope) of a time series. Best to go to the tools offered by your datasource.

Ah ok. Is it possible for that to be added to Grafana in the future? Rate of change based alerting seems like a pretty basic ask.

Feature requests can be started here: