---
title: "Monitor your alert rule | Grafana Labs"
description: "Verify your alert rule is working and understand its states."
---

# Monitor your alert rule

Your alert rule is now active, but how do you know it’s working? In this milestone, you’ll learn how to monitor your alert rule, understand its states, and verify it’s functioning correctly.

To monitor your alert rule, complete the following steps:

1. Navigate to **Alerts & IRM > Alerting > Alert rules**.
2. Locate your alert rule and observe its current state:
   
   Expand table
   
   | State       | Meaning                | What to expect                                    |
   |-------------|------------------------|---------------------------------------------------|
   | **Normal**  | Condition not met      | Your metric is below the threshold—this is good!  |
   | **Pending** | Condition met, waiting | Threshold crossed, but pending period not elapsed |
   | **Firing**  | Condition confirmed    | Alert is active, notifications sent               |
   | **Error**   | Evaluation failed      | Query or configuration issue                      |
   | **No Data** | No data returned       | Data source issue or query problem                |
3. Click on your alert rule to view its details.
   
   The detail view shows:
   
   - Current state and state history
   - When the rule was last evaluated
   - The query results and which instances (if multi-dimensional) are affected
4. View the **State history** tab to see how your alert has behaved over time.
   
   This helps you understand if the alert fires too frequently (threshold too sensitive) or never fires (threshold too high).
5. To test that notifications work, you can temporarily lower your threshold to trigger a firing state, then restore it.
   
   > **Important:** If testing in production, set a very short pending period and restore your original settings immediately after confirming notifications work.
6. Check your contact point (Slack, email, etc.) to verify notifications are delivered when the alert fires.

Your alert rule is now actively monitoring your infrastructure and will notify you when issues arise.

In the next milestone, you’ll complete your journey and learn about next steps.

* * *

### More to explore (optional)

- [View alert state and health](/docs/grafana/latest/alerting/monitor-status/view-alert-state/)