title: Grafana: Template variables are not supported in alert queries
body: <p>Hi I want to create a simple alert in grafana to check whether there is no data for the last 5 minutes.</p>
  
  <p>But I get an error </p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Template variables are not supported in alert queries</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Well, according to this <a href="https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/6230" rel="noreferrer">issue</a> templates are not supporting in grafana yet. 
  I have two questions:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p>What is templating?   </p></li>
  <li><p>How can I avoid this error?</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/onZAC.png" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/onZAC.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>