Grafana alerts (before version 8) worked great. We use them, but the Grafana 8 alerting features are half-baked at best.
* Grafana 8 alerts removed the Image Preview, which was extremely useful during issues. [0]
* Grafana 8 alerts don't have any way of being stored as code. In fact the API that they provide in their docs [0][1] doesn't work, or isn't up to date.
* The expression languages have zero documentation about them, so aren't exactly useful for things that might get a developer out of bed in the middle of the night.