How to Route Grafana Alerts to Pingzo Notification Channels

Grafana is an industry standard dashboard for tracking time-series metrics from Prometheus, InfluxDB, and Elasticsearch databases. While Grafana excels at visualizing database loads and system CPU spikes, its alerting options can be complex to configure. If you want to route Grafana metric alerts directly to developer chat portals like WhatsApp or Telegram, Pingzo provides a clean webhook gateway.

This guide details how to configure Grafana alerting contact points to forward incidents to Pingzo.

The Advantages of Routing Grafana through Pingzo

• Official WhatsApp Notifications: Send metrics alerts to developer phones via the official WhatsApp Business API, bypassing email inbox clutter.
• Centralized Incident Logs: Track metric alerts from Grafana alongside external HTTP check outages in a single dashboard.
• Simple Webhook Parsing: Pingzo automatically parses incoming Grafana alert payloads, extracts key labels, and formats the output into readable chat updates.
• Multi-Channel Escalation: Configure escalations to dispatch messages to Slack first, and then to WhatsApp or Telegram if the issue remains unresolved.

Configuration Steps

Follow these steps to connect your Grafana alerting rules to Pingzo:

Step 1: Create a Custom Webhook Channel in Pingzo

1. Log in to your Pingzo Dashboard and navigate to the Alert Channels page.
2. Click Add Channel and select Custom Webhook from the menu.
3. Assign it a descriptive name (e.g., "Grafana Alert Webhook").
4. Copy the generated Webhook Endpoint URL to your clipboard.
5. Click Save.

Step 2: Add Pingzo as a Contact Point in Grafana

1. Log in to your Grafana instance.
2. In the left sidebar, click the Alerting icon and navigate to Contact Points.
3. Click Add Contact Point.
4. Enter a name for the contact point (e.g., "Pingzo Notification Gateway").
5. Select Webhook from the integration type dropdown list.
6. Paste the Webhook Endpoint URL you copied in Step 1 into the URL field.
7. Set the HTTP Method to POST.
8. Click Save Contact Point.

Step 3: Map Contact Points to Alerting Rules

1. Go to the Grafana Notification Policies page.
2. Click New Policy or edit your default notification policy.
3. Set the contact point to "Pingzo Notification Gateway."
4. Under matching labels, define which alerting rules should trigger this contact point (e.g., set severity = critical or team = backend).
5. Click Save Policy.

Verification and Formatting

To verify that alerts are routing correctly:

1. On the Grafana Contact Points page, locate your Pingzo gateway and click the Test button.
2. Select a sample payload template and click Send Test Alert.
3. Confirm that you receive a structured notification in your connected Pingzo alert destinations (such as Telegram or WhatsApp).
4. Verify that metric parameters (like query values and server names) are formatted cleanly.
5. Ensure that alerts resolve automatically when Grafana sends a recovery payload.