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.