Grafana Email and Alerting Service

Grafana Alerting
1

Dear community,

I have started to get deeper in the alerting service configuration and I do have the following settings in my grafana.ini. Is there any guidance about how to configure this? Do I need to have an external smtp server for this purpose?
In regards to the [emails] section is something I could skip?

[smtp]
;enabled = false
;host = localhost:25
;user =

If the password contains # or ; you have to wrap it with triple quotes. Ex “”“#password;”“”

;password =
;cert_file =
;key_file =
;skip_verify = false
;from_address = admin@grafana.localhost
;from_name = Grafana

EHLO identity in SMTP dialog (defaults to instance_name)

;ehlo_identity = dashboard.example.com

SMTP startTLS policy (defaults to ‘OpportunisticStartTLS’)

;startTLS_policy = NoStartTLS

[emails]
;welcome_email_on_sign_up = false
;templates_pattern = emails/.html, emails/.txt
;content_types = text/html

My understanding is the following one, let me know if you think is correct or otherwise misses something:

[smtp]
enabled = false
host = localhost:25
;user =

If the password contains # or ; you have to wrap it with triple quotes. Ex “”“#password;”“”

;password =
;cert_file =
;key_file =
;skip_verify = false
;from_address = admin@grafana.localhost
;from_name = Grafana

EHLO identity in SMTP dialog (defaults to instance_name)

;ehlo_identity = dashboard.example.com

SMTP startTLS policy (defaults to ‘OpportunisticStartTLS’)

;startTLS_policy = NoStartTLS

or is more like I need a third party smtp provider based on this post 78611 in the alerting group
?

Thank you,
Guille

2

Or if it is needed something like this?
smtp:
enabled: true
host: smtp.gmail.com:587
user: “alertgrafan@gmail.com”
password: “**********”
skip_verify: true
from_address: “*****”
from_name: “Grafana”
startTLS_policy: “NoStartTLS”

Looking forward your thoughts,
Thank you,
Guille