We know that there are some gaps in the alerting feature (we dogfood it ourselves). The Grafana team will be focusing a lot more on alerting in 2020. For Grafana 7.0 in May, we are aiming to build better alerting that retains the simplicity of the current alerting but that will fill some of the those gaps. The new engine will decouple alerting from the graph panel and hopefully sidestep the problem with template variables. Once we have got further in the design stage then we will share more with the community about the proposed solutions.

Seconded! In the current world where dashboards are coupled to alerts, it's very frustrating not to be able to define alerts on a templated dashboard.

It's also frustrating that it's effectively impossible with the Cloudwatch data source to select resources to alert on using their tags (e.g. select the elb with app=foo and env=prod). The dimension_values() function lets you filter based on tags, but instead of being usable directly in a panel's query it requires using a variable as an intermediary, which then disables alerting.

So would I! It is something we're going start work on pretty soon I think - I mainly work on Prometheus, Loki, Cortex etc and not so much on Grafana. Will let one of the Grafana team comment.

Agreed, Grafana is very IT focused. Alerts are the first/last stop to IT accountability and seems there are some gaps in Grafana.