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.
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:
| 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 will transition first to
pendingand thenfiring, 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:
| State | Description |
|---|---|
| Normal | The state of an alert that is neither firing nor pending, everything is working correctly. |
| 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. |
| NoData | No data has been received for the configured time window. |
| Error | The error that occurred when attempting to evaluate an alerting rule. |
Alert rule health
An alert rule can have one the following health statuses:
| State | Description |
|---|---|
| Ok | No error when evaluating an alerting rule. |
| Error | An error occurred when evaluating an alerting rule. |
| NoData | The 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:
| Label | Description |
|---|---|
| alertname | Either DatasourceNoData or DatasourceError depending on the state. |
| datasource_uid | The 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.
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