Grafana 8 introduced a unified alerting system, enhancing the alerting experience by integrating Grafana panel alerts and Prometheus-style alerts into a consistent system across Grafana OSS, Grafana Cloud, and Grafana Enterprise. This update involves a major transformation of the alerting engine, providing a common API and consolidating alert management onto a single interface. The new system allows users to create, edit, and manage alerts more efficiently, supports multiple panel types, and improves the organization of notification channels and silences. The enhanced interface offers more functionalities, such as multi-dimensional alert rules and advanced filtering options, while maintaining compatibility with legacy alerts. Currently available in Feature Preview mode, the new alerting system will eventually become the default, automatically migrating all existing alerts and deprecating older plugins upon its full release.