View the state and health of alert 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 alert rules gives you several key status indicators about your alerts.
There are three components:
Although related, each component conveys subtly different information.
To view the state and health of your alert rules
-
From your Grafana console, in the Grafana menu, choose Alerts & IRM, Alerting.
-
Choose Alert rules to view the list of existing alerts.
-
Choose an alert rule to view its state and health.
Alert rule state
An alert rule can be in any of the following states:
| State | Description |
|---|---|
| Normal | None of the time series returned by the evaluation engine is
in a pending or firing state. |
| Pending | At least one time series returned by the evaluation engine is
pending. |
| Firing | At least one time series returned by the evaluation engine is
firing. |
Note
Alerts transition first to pending and then
firing, thus it takes at least two evaluation cycles before an
alert is fired.
Alert instance state
An alert instance can be in any of the following states:
| State | Description |
|---|---|
| Normal | The state of an alert that is neither pending
nor firing. Everything is working as expected. |
| 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. |
| No data | No data has been received for the configured time window. |
| Alerting | An error occurred when attempting to evaluate an alerting rule. |
Keep last state
An alert rule can be configured to keep the last state when a
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 of the following health statuses.
| State | Description |
|---|---|
| Ok | No errors when evaluating the alert rule. |
| Error | An error occurred when evaluating the alert rule. |
| NoData | The absence of data in at least one time series returned during a rule evaluation. |
| {status}, KeepLast | The rule would have received another status, but was configured to keep the last state of the alert rule. |
Special alerts for NoData and Error
When evaluation of an alert rule produces the state NoData or
Error, Grafana alerting will generate alert instances that have
the following additional labels.
| Label | Description |
|---|---|
| alertname | Either DatasourceNoData or
DatasourceError, depending on the state. |
| datasource_uid | The UID of the data source that caused the state. |
Note
You will need to set the no data or error handling to NoData
or Error in the alert rule, as described in the Configure Grafana managed alert rules topic, to generate
the additional labels.
You can handle these alerts the same way as regular alerts, including adding silences, routing to a contact point, and so on.
