---
title: "Common mistakes to avoid | Grafana Labs"
description: "Vague rule names, unsafe no-data handling, missing pending periods, and counter queries without a range function."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

## Common mistakes to avoid

These issues appear frequently in production alerting setups:

| Issue                                                 | Mistake                                                                             | Fix                                                                      |
|-------------------------------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Hard to identify the problem from the notification    | Vague alert names                                                                   | Use names that describe what and where                                   |
| Outages go unnoticed when data stops arriving         | No-data set to Normal                                                               | Use Keep Last State or Alerting for critical rules                       |
| Alerts fire on temporary spikes                       | Missing pending period                                                              | Set a pending period appropriate for your data                           |
| Incorrect values from counter metrics                 | Skipping a range function on a counter like `quickpizza_server_http_requests_total` | Add **Increase** (or **Rate**) over a time window before aggregating     |
| The alert fires on data that hasn’t fully arrived yet | Checking incomplete data                                                            | Adjust the query time range to exclude the most recent, incomplete data  |
| The alert has nothing to evaluate                     | Skipping the query preview                                                          | Run **Preview** and confirm one or more time series appear before saving |