State and health of alerting rules
This documentation topic is designed for Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 10.x.
For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 9.x, see Working in Grafana version 9.
For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 8.x, see Working in Grafana version 8.
The state and health of alerting rules help you understand several key status indicators about your alerts.
There are three key components: alert rule state, alert instance state, and alert rule health. Although related, each component conveys subtly different information.
Alert rule state
An alert rule can be in one of the following states:
| State | Description |
|---|---|
Normal |
None of the time series returned by the evaluation engine
is in a |
Pending |
At least one time series returned by the evaluation engine
is |
Firing |
At least one time series returned by the evaluation engine
is |
Note
Alerts will transition first to pending and then
firing, thus it will take at least two evaluation cycles
before an alert is fired.
Alert instance state
An alert instance can be in one of the following states:
| State | Description |
|---|---|
Normal |
The state of an alert that is neither firing nor pending, everything is working correctly. |
Pending |
The state of an alert that has been active for less than the configured threshold duration. |
Alerting |
The state of an alert that has been active for longer than the configured threshold duration. |
NoData |
No data has been received for the configured time window. |
Error |
The error that occurred when attempting to evaluate an alerting rule. |
Keep last state
An alert rule can be configured to keep the last state when
NoData or Error state is encountered. This will both
prevent alerts from firing, and from resolving and re-firing. Just like normal
evaluation, the alert rule will transition from Pending to
Firing after the pending period has elapsed.
Alert rule health
An alert rule can have one the following health statuses:
| State | Description |
|---|---|
Ok |
No error when evaluating an alerting rule. |
Error |
An error occurred when evaluating an alerting rule. |
NoData |
The absence of data in at least one time series returned during a rule evaluation. |
Special alerts for NoData and
Error
When evaluation of an alerting rule produces state
NoData or
Error, Grafana Alerting will generate alert
instances that have the following additional labels:
| Label | Description |
|---|---|
alertname |
Either |
datasource_uid |
The UID of the data source that caused the state. |
You can handle these alerts the same way as regular alerts by adding a silence, route to a contact point, and so on.
