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Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.

Grafana Cloud Enterprise Open source

State and health of alerting rules

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 either of the following states:

StateDescription
NormalNone of the time series returned by the evaluation engine is in a Pending or Firing state.
PendingAt least one time series returned by the evaluation engine is Pending.
FiringAt least one time series returned by the evaluation engine is Firing.

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 either of the following states:

StateDescription
NormalThe state of an alert that is neither firing nor pending, everything is working correctly.
PendingThe state of an alert that has been active for less than the configured threshold duration.
AlertingThe state of an alert that has been active for longer than the configured threshold duration.
NoDataNo data has been received for the configured time window.
ErrorThe error that occurred when attempting to evaluate an alerting rule.

Alert rule health

An alert rule can have one the following health statuses:

StateDescription
OkNo error when evaluating an alerting rule.
ErrorAn error occurred when evaluating an alerting rule.
NoDataThe 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:

LabelDescription
alertnameEither DatasourceNoData or DatasourceError depending on the state.
datasource_uidThe 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.