Allow alert evaluation based on future data

[glindsay78]

What would you like to be added:
It would be nice if the alert engine was able evaluate rules using future data (e.g forecasts). Currently the query option only allows a time range from the past to now e.g query(A, 15m, now). Ideally it would allow 'now+X' queries e.g query(A, 15m, now+48h) or query(A, 15m, 48h).

Why is this needed:
To accommodate other (non sys-admin) data use cases for Grafana where forecast data is being displayed (e.g meterological) and alerts are requested based on this data, to allow warnings ahead of time rather than afterwards.
An example use case in shipping would be a wind forecast alert for a container crane so that if the wind forecasts are over a certain threshold, an alert is generated and operational impacts can be assessed.

Thanks for an awesome product!

[bergquist]

Would make sense to add support for setting endtime in the future in Grafanas alerting. But I want to leave the forecasting to the datasource.

[glindsay78]

Yep I agree, leave the forecasting to the experts.
"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."

[Revilla2212]

+1

[glindsay78]

Looking at the code and how the golang time.ParseDuration function works, you can actually achieve this in Grafana (since v5.2 anyway).
Set the from part to '0s' (e.g now) and then put in a future time duration string e.g '12h'.
e.g query(A, 0s, 12h)

[Revilla2212]

Thanks for the info!

I tested it but in my case (influxdb and predicting with holt winters) that returned a "no data" state.
But, I did more testing and it worked for me using this query:

The 5h is because I specify holt winters to start predicting with the data of 5h ago.

[lihan]

Is there a way to pull data out of Grafana rather than the actual data source?

The reason is that this way, the prediction server only have to integrate with Grafana once and works with all data sources, otherwise have to integrate with every data source. (Prometheus, SQL, CloudWatch etc..)

#17834

[lessenko]

+1

[janwadebock]

I am trying this in v6.2.5 but can't get this to work.
Forecasted data of the high and low tide is entered in influx with future dates (max 48h in advance)
So would like to fire an alert when the tide will rise a given height in the near future (and not when the tide is already at this height)
When using the method as suggested glindsay78, I am always getting no data and so condition is not going to true.
Also not sure I understand solution from Revilla2212: I understood this would check data from now (0s) to 5 hours earlier. Not sure how this can be forecasted data. Anyway, in my case that did not work either.

Any suggestions ?