diff --git a/docs/configuration/alerting_rules.md b/docs/configuration/alerting_rules.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..905b2620314
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/configuration/alerting_rules.md
@@ -0,0 +1,98 @@
+---
+title: Alerting rules
+sort_rank: 3
+---
+
+# Alerting rules
+
+Alerting rules allow you to define alert conditions based on Prometheus
+expression language expressions and to send notifications about firing alerts
+to an external service. Whenever the alert expression results in one or more
+vector elements at a given point in time, the alert counts as active for these
+elements' label sets.
+
+Alerting rules are configured in Prometheus in the same way as [recording
+rules](recording_rules.md).
+
+### Defining alerting rules
+
+Alerting rules are defined in the following syntax:
+
+    ALERT <alert name>
+      IF <expression>
+      [ FOR <duration> ]
+      [ LABELS <label set> ]
+      [ ANNOTATIONS <label set> ]
+
+The alert name must be a valid metric name.
+
+The optional `FOR` clause causes Prometheus to wait for a certain duration
+between first encountering a new expression output vector element (like an
+instance with a high HTTP error rate) and counting an alert as firing for this
+element. Elements that are active, but not firing yet, are in pending state.
+
+The `LABELS` clause allows specifying a set of additional labels to be attached
+to the alert. Any existing conflicting labels will be overwritten. The label
+values can be templated.
+
+The `ANNOTATIONS` clause specifies another set of labels that are not
+identifying for an alert instance. They are used to store longer additional
+information such as alert descriptions or runbook links. The annotation values
+can be templated.
+
+#### Templating
+
+Label and annotation values can be templated using [console templates](https://prometheus.io/docs/visualization/consoles).
+The `$labels` variable holds the label key/value pairs of an alert instance
+and `$value` holds the evaluated value of an alert instance.
+
+    # To insert a firing element's label values:
+    {{ $labels.<labelname> }}
+    # To insert the numeric expression value of the firing element:
+    {{ $value }}
+
+Examples:
+
+    # Alert for any instance that is unreachable for >5 minutes.
+    ALERT InstanceDown
+      IF up == 0
+      FOR 5m
+      LABELS { severity = "page" }
+      ANNOTATIONS {
+        summary = "Instance {{ $labels.instance }} down",
+        description = "{{ $labels.instance }} of job {{ $labels.job }} has been down for more than 5 minutes.",
+      }
+
+    # Alert for any instance that have a median request latency >1s.
+    ALERT APIHighRequestLatency
+      IF api_http_request_latencies_second{quantile="0.5"} > 1
+      FOR 1m
+      ANNOTATIONS {
+        summary = "High request latency on {{ $labels.instance }}",
+        description = "{{ $labels.instance }} has a median request latency above 1s (current value: {{ $value }}s)",
+      }
+
+### Inspecting alerts during runtime
+
+To manually inspect which alerts are active (pending or firing), navigate to
+the "Alerts" tab of your Prometheus instance. This will show you the exact
+label sets for which each defined alert is currently active.
+
+For pending and firing alerts, Prometheus also stores synthetic time series of
+the form `ALERTS{alertname="<alert name>", alertstate="pending|firing", <additional alert labels>}`.
+The sample value is set to `1` as long as the alert is in the indicated active
+(pending or firing) state, and a single `0` value gets written out when an alert
+transitions from active to inactive state. Once inactive, the time series does
+not get further updates.
+
+### Sending alert notifications
+
+Prometheus's alerting rules are good at figuring what is broken *right now*, but
+they are not a fully-fledged notification solution. Another layer is needed to
+add summarization, notification rate limiting, silencing and alert dependencies
+on top of the simple alert definitions. In Prometheus's ecosystem, the
+[Alertmanager](https://prometheus.io/docs/alerting/alertmanager/) takes on this
+role. Thus, Prometheus may be configured to periodically send information about
+alert states to an Alertmanager instance, which then takes care of dispatching
+the right notifications. The Alertmanager instance may be configured via the
+`-alertmanager.url` command line flag.
diff --git a/docs/configuration.md b/docs/configuration/configuration.md
similarity index 99%
rename from docs/configuration.md
rename to docs/configuration/configuration.md
index 4efd392c77d..d2c4d081868 100644
--- a/docs/configuration.md
+++ b/docs/configuration/configuration.md
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 ---
 title: Configuration
-sort_rank: 3
+sort_rank: 1
 ---
 
 # Configuration
@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ the command-line flags configure immutable system parameters (such as storage
 locations, amount of data to keep on disk and in memory, etc.), the
 configuration file defines everything related to scraping [jobs and their
 instances](https://prometheus.io/docs/concepts/jobs_instances/), as well as
-which [rule files to load](querying/rules.md#configuring-rules).
+which [rule files to load](recording_rules.md#configuring-rules).
 
 To view all available command-line flags, run `prometheus -h`.
 
diff --git a/docs/configuration/index.md b/docs/configuration/index.md
new file mode 100644
index 00000000000..5cfaf2a5564
--- /dev/null
+++ b/docs/configuration/index.md
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
+---
+title: Configuration
+sort_rank: 3
+---
diff --git a/docs/querying/rules.md b/docs/configuration/recording_rules.md
similarity index 89%
rename from docs/querying/rules.md
rename to docs/configuration/recording_rules.md
index a1a413c707e..58f9fd91a7c 100644
--- a/docs/querying/rules.md
+++ b/docs/configuration/recording_rules.md
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 ---
 title: Recording rules
-sort_rank: 6
+sort_rank: 2
 ---
 
 # Defining recording rules
@@ -9,10 +9,9 @@ sort_rank: 6
 
 Prometheus supports two types of rules which may be configured and then
 evaluated at regular intervals: recording rules and [alerting
-rules](https://prometheus.io/docs/alerting/rules/). To include rules in
-Prometheus, create a file containing the necessary rule statements and have
-Prometheus load the file via the `rule_files` field in the [Prometheus
-configuration](../configuration.md).
+rules](alerting_rules.md). To include rules in Prometheus, create a file
+containing the necessary rule statements and have Prometheus load the file via
+the `rule_files` field in the [Prometheus configuration](configuration.md).
 
 The rule files can be reloaded at runtime by sending `SIGHUP` to the Prometheus
 process. The changes are only applied if all rule files are well-formatted.
diff --git a/docs/getting_started.md b/docs/getting_started.md
index a2518bd43e2..78a7d190e84 100644
--- a/docs/getting_started.md
+++ b/docs/getting_started.md
@@ -56,7 +56,7 @@ scrape_configs:
 ```
 
 For a complete specification of configuration options, see the
-[configuration documentation](configuration.md).
+[configuration documentation](configuration/configuration.md).
 
 ## Starting Prometheus
 
diff --git a/docs/index.md b/docs/index.md
index abab28508a4..b5849c9b153 100644
--- a/docs/index.md
+++ b/docs/index.md
@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ The documentation is available alongside all the project documentation at
 
 - [Installing](install.md)
 - [Getting started](getting_started.md)
-- [Configuration](configuration.md)
+- [Configuration](configuration/configuration.md)
 - [Querying](querying/basics.md)
 - [Storage](storage.md)
 - [Federation](federation.md)
diff --git a/docs/querying/basics.md b/docs/querying/basics.md
index f001c6d0d1a..45249e0211d 100644
--- a/docs/querying/basics.md
+++ b/docs/querying/basics.md
@@ -204,7 +204,7 @@ Prometheus's expression browser until the result set seems reasonable
 (hundreds, not thousands, of time series at most).  Only when you have filtered
 or aggregated your data sufficiently, switch to graph mode. If the expression
 still takes too long to graph ad-hoc, pre-record it via a [recording
-rule](rules.md#recording-rules).
+rule](../configuration/recording_rules.md#recording-rules).
 
 This is especially relevant for Prometheus's query language, where a bare
 metric name selector like `api_http_requests_total` could expand to thousands
diff --git a/docs/storage.md b/docs/storage.md
index 392e0c5a7a0..457bc831eba 100644
--- a/docs/storage.md
+++ b/docs/storage.md
@@ -160,7 +160,7 @@ in the next section.
 
 Case (3) depends on the targets you monitor. To mitigate an unplanned explosion
 of the number of series, you can limit the number of samples per individual
-scrape (see `sample_limit` in the [scrape config](configuration.md#scrape_config)).
+scrape (see `sample_limit` in the [scrape config](configuration/configuration.md#scrape_config)).
 If the number of active time series exceeds the number of memory chunks the
 Prometheus server can afford, the server will quickly throttle ingestion as
 described above. The only way out of this is to give Prometheus more RAM or