Up to this point, we've been looking at Grafana's analytical features. In this chapter, will we move on to another important component of data visualization applications—alerting. In many typical data analysis scenarios, it is perfectly legitimate to concentrate solely on visualization. However, there are a number of scenarios that require not only using Grafana to tell stories about data but also focusing your attention and potentially triggering an action.
Before we tackle alerting, we'll take a closer look at thresholds. Thresholds, while superficially similar in concept to an alert, are significantly different. Nonetheless, they provide a good way of preparing yourself for working with alerts. They are primarily intended as visual aids, and since they don't trigger any sort of actions, you won't be waking anybody up at 3 A.M. when testing them out!
We will need...
