Alerting
Alerting runs rules against your metrics and logs and notifies people when a condition holds. Rules, routing, contact points and silences all live in the portal, so there is nothing to install and nothing to connect.
Open Insights → Alerting. Nine pages sit under it, each with its own link you can bookmark or paste into a ticket.
Start here
Three things have to be true before an alert reaches a person:
- A contact point exists. Somewhere to send to: a Slack channel, a PagerDuty service, an inbox. See Contact points.
- The default notification policy points at it. A fresh organization routes to a placeholder that delivers nowhere. See Notification policies.
- A rule fires. A query, a threshold, and how long the threshold has to hold. See Alert rules.
Do them in that order and the first rule you write notifies somebody. Do them in the other order and the rule fires into nothing.
The pages
| Page | What you do there |
|---|---|
| Alert rules | Write the conditions that generate alerts |
| Active alerts | See what is firing now and silence it |
| Contact points | Slack, email, PagerDuty, webhooks |
| Notification policies | Decide which alert reaches which contact point |
| Silences | Stop notifications for a while |
| Mute timings | Recurring quiet windows |
| Inhibition rules | Hide the symptoms behind a cause |
| Templates | Change the wording of notifications |
| Settings | Delivery history and configuration rollback |
Reading the docs
How alerting works is worth ten minutes before you write your first rule. It covers the path from a query to a notification, and the states a rule moves through on the way.
Notifications are not arriving is the page to open when a rule says Firing and nobody was told.
Coming from Grafana Alerting maps what you already know onto what is here.
Who can change what
| Role | Alerting |
|---|---|
| Member | Reads everything. Changes nothing |
| Editor | Writes rules, contact points, policies, silences, mute timings, inhibition rules and templates |
| Admin | Everything an editor can do, plus reading stored contact point secrets back |
| Owner | Everything |
Controls you cannot use are hidden rather than disabled, so a member sees the alerting pages with the read-only view of each one.
Alerting from an AI assistant
The xScaler MCP server can list rules, check a rule against current data before it is saved, create a rule, and pause one. See Tool reference and Create an alert rule.
Your own Grafana
Grafana's alerting engine works against xScaler data sources, and existing rules keep running. See Alerts in your own Grafana.