How does unified alerting work in Grafana?
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Quick Answer
An alert rule evaluates a query on a schedule; when the condition holds for the 'for' duration, it fires and routes to contact points via notification policies.
Detailed Answer
You define a query and threshold, a pending period ('for') to suppress blips, labels (e.g. severity), and a notification policy that maps labels to contact points (Slack, PagerDuty, email). Alert on user-visible symptoms (error rate, latency), not causes (CPU). Provision rules as code so they live in Git.
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Interview Tip
State the golden rule: alert on symptoms, not causes.
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