# State and health of alerting rules
States and health

****  
This documentation topic is designed for Grafana workspaces that support **Grafana version 9.x**.  
For Grafana workspaces that support Grafana version 10.x, see [Working in Grafana version 10](using-grafana-v10.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 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 `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 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\$1uid  |  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.