Use contact points to define how your contacts are notified when an alert fires. A contact point can have one or more contact point types, for example, email, slack, webhook, and so on. When an alert fires, a notification is sent to all contact point types listed for a contact point. Optionally, use [message templates]({{< relref "message-templating/" >}}) to customize notification messages for the contact point types.
You can configure Grafana managed contact points as well as contact points for an [external Alertmanager data source]({{< relref "../../datasources/alertmanager/" >}}). For more information, see [Alertmanager]({{< relref "../fundamentals/alertmanager/" >}}).
Before you begin, see [About Grafana Alerting]({{< relref "../about-alerting/" >}}) which explains the various components of Grafana Alerting. We also recommend that you familiarize yourself with some of the [fundamental concepts]({{< relref "../fundamentals/" >}}) of Grafana Alerting.
