Alert instances

Grafana managed alerts support multi-dimensional alerting. Each alert rule can create multiple alert instances. This is exceptionally powerful if you are observing multiple series in a single expression.

Consider the following PromQL expression:

sum by(cpu) (
  rate(node_cpu_seconds_total{mode!="idle"}[1m])
)

A rule using this expression will create as many alert instances as the amount of CPUs we are observing after the first evaluation, allowing a single rule to report the status of each CPU.

A multi-dimensional Grafana managed alert rule
Figure 1. A multi-dimensional Grafana managed alert rule