Congrats on release! We've been using Grafana for a few years now, and personally built-in alerting is the only thing I would have added. Some may argue that this "violates" good concern separation practices, but honestly you are going to be alerting about the same data you feed to Grafana, so at the end of the day it makes a lot of sense. Call it a "two in one" if you will. Either way this will make monitoring with Grafana much more streamlined.
Agreed with the sentiment re: streamlined experience.
We struggled a bit with whether or not it really "belonged" in Grafana, but we believe in alerting while "in the flow".
It makes a lot of sense (from an experience standpoint) to 'manage' alerting while you're 'managing' your dashboards, visualizations, and queries; you already have a sense of the data _right there_.
As someone who is not too familiar with Graphana but is tasked with deploying it (shortly), just curious about the alerting and some of what I can do with it? I will read through the release page, but it's fun to get it from the horses mouth, if you're still available to comment?