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:

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 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:

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 alert rule.

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:

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.

{status}, KeepLast

The rule would have received another status but was configured to keep the last state of the alert rule.

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:

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.