Inhibition is a concept of suppressing notifications for certain alerts if certain other alerts are already firing.

Example: An alert is firing that informs that an entire cluster is not reachable. Alertmanager can be configured to mute all other alerts concerning this cluster if that particular alert is firing. This prevents notifications for hundreds or thousands of firing alerts that are unrelated to the actual issue.

Inhibitions are configured through the Alertmanager's configuration file.