Use Grafana Alerting to track and generate alerts and send notifications, providing an efficient way for engineers to monitor, respond, and triage issues within their services.
Set up or upgrade your implementation of Grafana Alerting.
**Note:**
These are set-up instructions for Grafana Alerting Open Source.
## Before you begin
- Configure your [data sources](ref:data-source-management)
- Check which data sources are compatible with and supported by [Grafana Alerting](ref:data-source-alerting)
Watch this short video to get started, or follow the [written tutorial](http://grafana.com/tutorials/alerting-get-started/).
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## Set up Alerting
To set up Alerting, you need to:
1. Configure alert rules
- Create Grafana-managed or Mimir/Loki-managed alert rules and recording rules
1. Configure contact points
- Check the default contact point and update the email address
- Optional: Add new contact points and integrations
1. Configure notification policies
- Check the default notification policy
- Optional: Add additional nested policies
- Optional: Add labels and label matchers to control alert routing
1. Optional: Integrate with [Grafana OnCall](/docs/oncall/latest/integrations/grafana-alerting)
## Advanced set up options
# Additional configuration
Grafana Alerting supports many additional configuration options, from configuring external Alertmanagers to routing Grafana-managed alerts outside of Grafana, to defining your alerting setup as code.
Grafana Alerting offers a variety of advanced configuration options to further tailor your alerting setup. These optional features include configuring up permissions and role-based access control, adding external Alertmanagers, or defining your alerting setup as code. While not essential for basic alerting, these options can enhance security, scalability, and automation in complex environments.
The following topics provide you with advanced configuration options for Grafana Alerting.
- [Provision alert rules using file provisioning](ref:file-provisioning)
- [Provision alert rules using Terraform](ref:terraform-provisioning)
- [Add an external Alertmanager](ref:configure-alertmanager)
- [Configure roles and permissions](ref:alerting-permissions)
- [Configure RBAC](ref:alerting-rbac)
- [Configure alert state history](ref:alert-state-history)
- [Use configuration files to provision](ref:file-provisioning)
- [Use Terraform to provision](ref:terraform-provisioning)