# Stop notifications for individual alarms In this short tutorial, you'll learn how to stop notifications for individual alarms in Netdata's health monitoring system. We also refer to this process as _silencing_ the alarm. Why silence alarms? We designed Netdata's pre-configured alarms for production systems, so they might not be relevant if you run Netdata on your laptop or a small virtual server. If they're not helpful, they can be a distraction to real issues with health and performance. Silencing individual alarms is an excellent solution for situations where you're not interested in seeing a specific alarm but don't want to disable a [notification system](/health/notifications/README.md) entirely. ## Find the alarm configuration file To silence an alarm, you need to know where to find its configuration file. Let's use the `system.cpu` chart as an example. It's the first chart you'll see on most Netdata dashboards. To figure out which file you need to edit, open up Netdata's dashboard and, click the **Alarms** button at the top of the dashboard, followed by clicking on the **All** tab. In this example, we're looking for the `system - cpu` entity, which, when opened, looks like this:  In the `source` row, you see that this chart is getting its configuration from `4@/usr/lib/netdata/conf.d/health.d/cpu.conf`. The relevant part of begins at `health.d`: `health.d/cpu.conf`. That's the file you need to edit if you want to silence this alarm. For more information about editing or referencing health configuration files on your system, see the [health quickstart](/health/QUICKSTART.md#edit-health-configuration-files). ## Edit the file to enable silencing To edit `health.d/cpu.conf`, use `edit-config` from inside of your Netdata configuration directory. ```bash cd /etc/netdata/ # Replace with your Netdata configuration directory, if not /etc/netdata/ ./edit-config health.d/cpu.conf ``` > You may need to use `sudo` or another method of elevating your privileges. The beginning of the file looks like this: ```yaml template: 10min_cpu_usage on: system.cpu os: linux hosts: * lookup: average -10m unaligned of user,system,softirq,irq,guest units: % every: 1m warn: $this > (($status >= $WARNING) ? (75) : (85)) crit: $this > (($status == $CRITICAL) ? (85) : (95)) delay: down 15m multiplier 1.5 max 1h info: average cpu utilization for the last 10 minutes (excluding iowait, nice and steal) to: sysadmin ``` To silence this alarm, change `sysadmin` to `silent`. ```yaml to: silent ``` Use one of the available [methods](/health/QUICKSTART.md#reload-health-configuration) to reload your health configuration and ensure you get no more notifications about that alarm**. You can add `to: silent` to any alarm you'd rather not bother you with notifications. ## What's next? You should now know the fundamentals behind silencing any individual alarm in Netdata. To learn about _all_ of Netdata's health configuration possibilities, visit the [health reference guide](/health/REFERENCE.md), or check out other [tutorials on health monitoring](/health/README.md#guides). Or, take better control over how you get notified about alarms via the [notification system](/health/notifications/README.md). You can also use Netdata's [Health Management API](/web/api/health/README.md#health-management-api) to control health checks and notifications while Netdata runs. With this API, you can disable health checks during a maintenance window or backup process, for example.