Silences
Deploying during a maintenance window and don't want to wake the on-call team? A silence temporarily mutes matching alert notifications for a set time window, so planned maintenance, known outages, and active investigations don't flood people with noise - while the rules keep evaluating in the background so nothing is actually missed.
Navigate to Alerting > Notifications and open the Silences tab to view and manage silences. Use Show expired to see silences that have already ended.
Note
Silences stop notifications from being sent but do not stop alert rules from evaluating. Firing alerts remain visible in Status.
Silences vs. Time Intervals
Both suppress notifications without stopping rule evaluation, but serve different purposes:
| Silences | Time Intervals | |
|---|---|---|
| Setup | Created ad-hoc and matched to alerts using label matchers | Defined as a schedule and linked to a notification policy |
| Period | One-time, with a fixed start and end time | Recurring (such as, every weekend or every Monday) |
| Primary use | Unexpected maintenance, incident response, or quick one-offs | Scheduled maintenance windows or off-hours for non-critical alerts |
Creating a silence
- Click + New silence
- Under Label matchers, add label key/value pairs to identify which alerts to mute. Click + Add matcher to add more:
| Operator | Meaning |
|---|---|
= |
Exact match |
!= |
Does not match |
=~ |
Regex match |
!~ |
Regex does not match |
- Set the Time window: pick a quick duration (1h, 2h, 4h, 8h, 12h, 24h, 48h, or 1 week), or set Starts at and Ends at manually
- Add a Comment describing why the silence was created (such as,
Replacing database server) - Click Create silence to activate it
Tip
Add a comment even for short silences - it helps teammates understand why alerts are quiet when they check the Silences page.
Learn more