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Silences

Silences temporarily suppress alert notifications without stopping the alert evaluation process itself. Use them to prevent notification noise during known events, such as scheduled maintenance windows or active incident response.

Suppressing Notifications: Silences vs. Mute Timings

While both Silences and Mute Timings stop notifications from reaching your contact points, they serve different purposes. Importantly, neither method stops the system from evaluating alert rules or displaying active alert instances in the user interface - they only prevent the actual notification from being sent.

The table below highlights the key differences to help you choose the right tool:

Comparison: Silences vs. Mute Timings

Feature Silences Mute Timings
Setup Created independently and applied to alerts using Label Matchers. Defined as "Time Intervals" and then linked to specific Notification Policies.
Period Designed for one-time use with a fixed start and end time. Designed for recurring schedules (such as, every Monday or every weekend).
Primary Use Ad-hoc incident response or unexpected emergency maintenance. Scheduled maintenance windows or "off-hours" for non-critical alerts.

How to Create a Silence

A Silence allows you to temporarily stop notifications during specific windows, such as emergency maintenance or incident response.

  1. Open Silences: Navigate to Alerting and select the Silences tab.
  2. Select Alertmanager: Choose the appropriate Alertmanager from the dropdown (this determines which data sources the silence affects).
  3. Create New Silence: Click + Create silence.

  4. Set the Window: In Silence start and end, select the dates and times for the suppression period.

    Tip

    You can also enter a Duration (such as, 2h), which will automatically calculate the end time for you.

  5. Define Matching Labels: In the Matching Labels section, enter the specific Label and Value pairs to identify which alerts to mute. The following operators are available:

    Operator Meaning
    = Exact match
    != Does not match
    =~ Regex match
    !~ Regex does not match

    Example

    Entering severity = critical will only silence critical alerts, while other alerts will still notify as usual.

  6. Add Comment (Recommended): Enter a brief description explaining why the silence was created (such as, "Replacing database server").

  7. Submit: Click Submit to activate the silence.

Learn more

Edit & remove silences