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Docs / Alerting and retries / Alert states

Alert states

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Sending out alert notifications like emails and Slack hooks depends on four factors:

  1. The alert state of the check, e.g. “passing”, “degraded” or “failing”.
  2. The transition between these states.
  3. Your threshold alerting preferences, e.g. “alert after two failures” or “alert after 5 minutes of failures”.
  4. Your notification preferences per alert channel.

As you can see, 1 and 2 are how Checkly works in the backend; you have no influence on this. But 3 and 4 are user configurable. We can even add a fifth factor: if the check is muted, no alerts are send out at all.

Note: Browser checks currently do not have a degraded state.

Alert states & transitions

The following table shows all states and their transitions. There are some exceptions to some of the more complex states, as the history or “vector” of the state transition influences how we alert.

transition notification threshold code notes
✅ –> ✅ None - NO_ALERT Nothing to see here, keep moving
✅ –> ⚠️ Degraded x ALERT_DEGRADED Send directly, if threshold is “alert after 1 failure”
✅ –> ❌ Failure x ALERT_FAILURE Send directly, if threshold is “alert after 1 failure”
⚠️ –> ⚠️ Degraded x ALERT_DEGRADED_REMAIN i.e. when threshold is “alert after 2 failures” or “after 5 minutes”
⚠️ –> ✅ Recovery - ALERT_DEGRADED_RECOVERY Send but only if you received a degraded notification before
⚠️ –> ❌ Failure - ALERT_DEGRADED_FAILURE This is an escalation, it overrides any threshold setting. We send this even if you already received degraded notifications
❌ –> ❌ Failure x ALERT_FAILURE_REMAIN i.e. when threshold is “alert after 2 failures” or “after 5 minutes”
❌ –> ⚠️ Degraded - ALERT_FAILURE_DEGRADED This is a deescalation, it overrides any thresholds settings. We send this even if you already received failure notifications
❌️ –> ✅ Recovery - ALERT_RECOVERY Send directly

✅ = passing
⚠️ = degraded
❌ = “hard” failing

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