› Alerts › Grafana 8 Alerts › Silence alert notifications

Silence alert notifications

Grafana allows to you to prevent notifications from one or more alert rules by creating a silence. This silence lasts for a specified window of time.

Silences do not prevent alert rules from being evaluated. They also do not stop alert instances being shown in the user interface. Silences only prevent notifications from being created.

Grafana alerting UI allows you to configure silences for the Grafana managed alerts (handled by the embedded Alertmanager) as well as silences for an external Alertmanager if one is configured, using the Alertmanager dropdown.

Note: Currently the configuration of the embedded Alertmanager is shared across organisations. Therefore users are advised to use the new Grafana 8 Alerts only if they have one organisation otherwise silences for the Grafana managed alerts will be visible by all organizations.

Add a silence

To add a silence:

  1. In the Grafana menu, hover your cursor over the Alerting (bell) icon and then select Silences (crossed out bell icon).
  2. Click the New Silence button.
  3. Select the start and end date in Silence start and end to indicate when the silence should go into effect and expire.
  4. Optionally, update the Duration to alter the time for the end of silence in the previous step to correspond to the start plus the duration.
  5. Enter one or more Matching Labels by filling out the Name and Value fields. Matchers determine which rules the silence will apply to.
  6. Enter a Comment.
  7. Enter the name of the owner in Creator.
  8. Click Create.

How label matching works

Alert instances that have labels that match all of the “Matching Labels” specified in the silence will have their notifications suppressed.

  • The Label field is the name of the label to match. It must exactly match the label name.
  • The Value field matches against the corresponding value for the specified Label name. How it matches depends on the Regex and Equal checkboxes.
  • The Regex checkbox specifies if the inputted Value should be matched against labels as a regular expression. The regular expression is always anchored. If not selected it is an exact string match.
  • The Equal checkbox specifies if the match should include alert instances that match or do not match. If not checked, the silence includes alert instances do not match.

Viewing and editing silences

  1. In the Grafana menu hover your cursor over the Alerting (bell) icon, then select Silences (crossed out bell icon).
  2. To end the silence, click the Unsilence option next to the listed silence. Silences that have ended are still listed and are automatically removed after 5 days. There is no method for manual removal.
  3. To edit a silence, click the pencil icon next to the listed silence. Edit the silence using instructions on how to create a silence.
  4. Click Submit to save your changes.

Manage silences for an external Alertmanager

Grafana alerting UI supports managing external Alertmanager silences. Once you add an Alertmanager data source, a dropdown displays at the top of the page where you can select either Grafana or an external Alertmanager as your data source.

Create a URL to silence form with defaults filled in

When linking to a silence form, provide the default matching labels and comment via matchers and comment query parameters. The matchers parameter requires one more matching labels of the type [label][operator][value] joined by a comma while the operator parameter can be one of the following: = (equals, not regex), != (not equals, not regex), =~ (equals, regex), !~ (not equals, regex).

For example, to link to silence form with matching labels severity=critical & cluster!~europe-.* and comment Silence critical EU alerts, create a URL https://mygrafana/aleting/silence/new?matchers=severity%3Dcritical%2Ccluster!~europe-*&comment=Silence%20critical%20EU%20alert.

To link to a new silence page for an external Alertmanager, add a alertmanager query parameter with the Alertmanager data source name.