# View the state and health of alert rules
<a name="v10-alerting-manage-rulestate"></a>

****  
This documentation topic is designed for Grafana workspaces that support **Grafana version 10.x**.  
For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 12.x, see [Working in Grafana version 12](using-grafana-v12.md).  
For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 9.x, see [Working in Grafana version 9](using-grafana-v9.md).  
For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 8.x, see [Working in Grafana version 8](using-grafana-v8.md).

The state and health of alert rules gives you several key status indicators about your alerts.

There are three components:
+ [Alert rule state](#v10-alerting-manage-rulestate-state)
+ [Alert instance state](#v10-alerting-manage-rulestate-instance)
+ [Alert rule health](#v10-alerting-manage-rulestate-health)

Although related, each component conveys subtly different information.

**To view the state and health of your alert rules**

1. From your Grafana console, in the Grafana menu, choose **Alerting**.

1. Choose **Alert rules** to view the list of existing alerts.

1. Choose an alert rule to view its state and health.

## Alert rule state
<a name="v10-alerting-manage-rulestate-state"></a>

An alert rule can be in any 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 transition first to `pending` and then `firing`, thus it takes at least two evaluation cycles before an alert is fired.

## Alert instance state
<a name="v10-alerting-manage-rulestate-instance"></a>

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


| State | Description | 
| --- | --- | 
| Normal | The state of an alert that is neither pending nor firing. Everything is working as expected. | 
| 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. | 
| No data | No data has been received for the configured time window. | 
| Alerting | An error occurred when attempting to evaluate an alerting rule. | 

## Keep last state
<a name="v10-alerting-manage-rulestate-keepstate"></a>

An alert rule can be configured to keep the last state when a `NoData` 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
<a name="v10-alerting-manage-rulestate-health"></a>

An alert rule can have one of the following health statuses.


| State | Description | 
| --- | --- | 
| Ok | No errors when evaluating the alert rule. | 
| Error | An error occurred when evaluating the alert rule. | 
| NoData | The absence of data in at least one time series returned during a rule evaluation. | 
| \$1status\$1, 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
<a name="v10-alerting-manage-rulestate-special"></a>

When evaluation of an alert rule produces the 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\$1uid | The UID of the data source that caused the state. | 

**Note**  
You will need to set the no data or error handling to `NoData` or `Error` in the alert rule, as described in the [Configure Grafana managed alert rules](v10-alerting-configure-grafanamanaged.md) topic, to generate the additional labels.

You can handle these alerts the same way as regular alerts, including adding silences, routing to a contact point, and so on.