Grafana 13.2: Multiple notification policies to route alerts without a single global tree

Anyone managing Grafana Alerting for multiple teams on the same stack knows the problem: a single notification policy tree shared by everyone, where modifying the routing for one service means touching the configuration of all the others. With Grafana 13.2, announced on 21 September 2026 on the official project blog, this limitation is overcome with multiple notification policies, graduating from feature flag to general availability.

What changes in practice

From Grafana 13.2 onwards, multiple notification policies are generally available in Grafana-managed alerting: you can create notification policy trees with a name, assign alert rules to a specific policy and manage each policy independently. The feature was already present but reserved for testers: it required the alertingMultiplePolicies feature flag, in public preview, and when the flag was disabled the system continued to use a single notification policy tree.

The key point for those handling maintenance is backward compatibility: existing alert rules continue to use the default notification policy unless they are explicitly assigned to a named policy, so adoption can happen in stages without having to migrate all rules at once.

Separate provisioning and permissions per team

Each named policy becomes a standalone resource: teams can create named policy trees, assign alert rules directly to a specific policy and manage each policy independently via UI, API or Terraform, with per-team provisioning, isolated changes (updating one policy doesn't touch the others) and role-based access control at the level of individual policies.

For those managing infrastructure as code, the Terraform-side novelty is the dedicated resource: each named routing tree is configured separately, with support for nested routes, matchers, grouping, notification timing and provenance controls to decide whether the policy remains editable outside of Terraform.

It remains to be seen, for those managing shared stacks across multiple customers or departments, whether the multiple policy model truly simplifies reviewing routing trees or merely shifts the complexity from single configuration to managing multiple separate resources that need to be kept in sync.