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Documentation Grafana documentation Alerting Introduction Alert rules State and health of alert rules

State and health of alert rules

The state and health of alert 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:

The alert rule state is determined by the “worst case” state of the alert instances produced. For example, if one alert instance is firing, the alert rule state will also be firing.

Alert instance state

An alert instance can be in either of the following states:

Keep last state

An alert rule can be configured to keep the last state when a NoData and/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:

Special alerts for NoData and Error

When evaluation of an alert rule produces state NoData or Error, Grafana Alerting will generate alert instances that have the following additional labels:

You can handle these alerts the same way as regular alerts by adding a silence, route to a contact point, and so on.