Show external alarms in Grafana

Currently I am trying to make a dashboard where I want to show alarms coming from an OPC server. I noticed Grafana has an alert panel but as far as I can see it only handles internal alarms. So is it possible to connect the alert panel to an external data source as input?

Yes, this is totally possible. You can alert on the value returned by a datasource query. You should have a much better chance completing your goal with the new Unified Alerting in Grafana 8, which shipped today. It’s an entirely new alerting platform with much greater power and ease-of-use. And it includes much greater support for variables in alerts

Check it out:
docker run -p 3000:3000 --name=grafana -e "GF_FEATURE_TOGGLES_ENABLE=ngalert" grafana/grafana:8.0.2