+++
title = "Opt-in to Grafana alerting"
description = "Enable Grafana alerts"
weight = 113
aliases = ["/docs/grafana/latest/alerting/unified-alerting/opt-in/"]
+++

# Opt-in to Grafana alerting in OSS

Grafana alerting is enabled by default for new Cloud and OSS installations.

- For existing OSS installations that use legacy dashboard alerts, unified alerting is still an opt-in feature.
- For existing Grafana Cloud users, contact customer support to enable Grafana alerting for your Cloud stack.

## Before you begin

We recommend that you backup Grafana's database. If you are using PostgreSQL as the backend database, then the minimum required version is 9.5.

## Enable Grafana alerting

To enable Grafana alerts:

1. In your custom configuration file ($WORKING_DIR/conf/custom.ini), go to the [unified alerts]({{< relref "../administration/configuration.md#unified_alerting" >}}) section.
2. Set the `enabled` property to `true`.
3. Next, for [legacy dashboard alerting]({{< relref "../administration/configuration.md#alerting" >}}), set the `enabled` flag to `false`.
4. Restart Grafana for the configuration changes to take effect.

> **Note:** The `ngalert` toggle previously used to enable or disable Grafana alerting is no longer available.

Before v8.2, notification logs and silences were stored on a disk. If you did not use persistent disks, you would have lost any configured silences and logs on a restart, resulting in unwanted or duplicate notifications. We no longer require the use of a persistent disk. Instead, the notification logs and silences are stored regularly (every 15 minutes). If you used the file-based approach, Grafana reads the existing file and persists it eventually.

## Disable Grafana alerts

To disable Grafana alerts and roll back to legacy dashboard alerting:

1. In your custom configuration file ($WORKING_DIR/conf/custom.ini), go to the [Grafana alerting]({{< relref "../administration/configuration.md#unified_alerting" >}}) section.
1. Set the `enabled` property to `false`.
1. For [legacy dashboard alerting]({{< relref "../administration/configuration.md#alerting" >}}), set the `enabled` flag to `true`.
1. Restart Grafana for the configuration changes to take effect.

> **Note:** Switching from one flavor of alerting to another can result in data loss. This is applicable to the fresh installation as well as upgraded setups.