Silences stop notifications from being created for a specified time window but do not interrupt alert evaluation. Use them to temporarily prevent alert notifications, such as during incident response or a maintenance window.
Silences are assigned to a [specific Alertmanager](ref:alertmanager-architecture) and only suppress notifications for alerts managed by that Alertmanager.
[Mute timings](ref:shared-mute-timings) and [silences](ref:shared-silences) are distinct methods to suppress notifications. They do not prevent alert rules from being evaluated or stop alert instances from appearing in the user interface; they only prevent notifications from being created.
The following table highlights the key differences between mute timings and silences.
1. From the **Alertmanager** dropdown, select an external Alertmanager to create and manage silences for the external data source. Otherwise, keep the default option of Grafana.
1. Click **Create silence** to open the Create silence page.
1. In **Silence start and end**, select the start and end date to indicate when the silence should go into effect and expire.
1. Optionally, in **Duration**, specify how long the silence is enforced. This automatically updates the end time in the **Silence start and end** field.
Use [labels](ref:shared-alert-labels) and label matchers to link alert rules to [notification policies](ref:shared-notification-policies) and [silences](ref:shared-silences). This allows for a flexible way to manage your alert instances, specify which policy should handle them, and which alerts to silence.
A label matchers consists of 3 distinct parts, the **label**, the **value** and the **operator**.
- The **Label** field is the name of the label to match. It must exactly match the label name.
- The **Value** field matches against the corresponding value for the specified **Label** name. How it matches depends on the **Operator** value.
- The **Operator** field is the operator to match against the label value. The available operators are:
If you are using multiple label matchers, they are combined using the AND logical operator. This means that all matchers must match in order to link a rule to a policy.
Rule-specific silences are silences that apply only to a specific alert rule. They're created when you silence an alert rule directly using the **Silence notifications** action in the UI.
As opposed to general silences, rule-specific silence access is tied directly to the alert rule they act on. They can be created manually by including the specific label matcher: `__alert_rule_uid__=<alert rule UID>`.
Default notification messages often include a link to silence alerts.
In custom notification templates, you can use [`.Alert.SilenceURL`](ref:silence-url) to redirect users to the UI where they can silence the given alert.
If [`.Alert.SilenceURL`](ref:silence-url) doesn’t fit your specific use case, you can also create a custom silence link for your custom templates.
{{<collapsetitle="Create a custom silence link">}}
When linking to a silence form, provide the default matching labels and comment via `matcher` and `comment` query parameters. The `matcher` parameter should be in the following format `[label][operator][value]` where the `operator` parameter can be one of the following: `=` (equals, not regular expression), `!=` (not equals, not regular expression), `=~` (equals, regular expression), `!~` (not equals, regular expression).
The URL can contain many query parameters with the key `matcher`.
For example, to link to silence form with matching labels `severity=critical`&`cluster!~europe-.*` and comment `Silence critical EU alerts`, create a URL `https://mygrafana/alerting/silence/new?matcher=severity%3Dcritical&matcher=cluster!~europe-*&comment=Silence%20critical%20EU%20alert`.
To link to a new silence page for an external Alertmanager, add a `alertmanager` query parameter with the Alertmanager data source name.
{{</collapse>}}
## Inhibition rules
Inhibition rules are supported in the Prometheus Alertmanager. You can [configure a Prometheus Alertmanager](ref:configure-alertmanager) to handle the notification of alerts and suppress notifications via inhibition rules.
Inhibition rules are not currently supported in the Grafana Alertmanager. For tracking the progress of this feature request, follow [this GitHub issue](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/68822).
