Alert-based Service Health in APM provides an immediate, visual traffic light assessment of the operational state of your monitored services within Coralogix.

This feature enables at-a-glance understanding of service reliability and helps reduce the time it takes to identify and respond to issues.

## Key benefits

- **Quick overview:** Instantly see which services are healthy or experiencing issues directly from Service Catalog.
- **Simplified visibility:** Complex conditions and alerts are rolled up into a single indicator.
- **Direct context:** Drill down into metrics, traces, logs, or triggering alerts for details.

## How it works

The Service Health Indicator provides an immediate, visual traffic light assessment of the operational state of your monitored services within Coralogix.

- **🟩 Healthy (Green):** No active incidents.
- **🟨 Warning (Yellow):** At least one active incident with a low priority (P3, P4, P5).
- **🟥 Critical (Red):** At least one active incident with a high priority (P1, P2).
- **⬛ Unmonitored (Gray):** No incidents because no alerts are configured.

This feature gives you a quick, intuitive way to understand the health of services without needing to drill down into multiple dashboards. Get immediate use of this feature’s benefits by configuring [alerts](https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/apm/features/monitoring-with-alerts/index.md) for your services.

## Enabling service health

To enable Service Health, you first need to define an alert for your service. You can create an alert in two ways:

- From the APM overview page, by selecting the relevant [metric](https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/apm/features/monitoring-with-alerts/index.md).
- By adding service catalog labels when defining the [alert](https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/alerting/define-alert-details/#labels).

To ensure your Service Health status is accurate and meaningful, you must configure well-defined alerts with priorities that directly reflect the real-world business impact of an issue.

Once an alert is configured:

- The service is shown as **Healthy** when no incidents are active.
- If an incident is triggered (or acknowledged), the service health status updates based on the incident’s priority.
- After the incident is resolved, the service automatically returns to the **Healthy** state.

## Best practices

- Base your service health rules on key APM metrics such as error rate, latency, throughput, and Apdex.
- Revisit thresholds regularly, especially after scaling events, new deployments, or architecture changes. Use historical data to refine what **Healthy** looks like for each service.
- When a service goes unhealthy, check its health metrics, logs, SLOs and resources at a glance in the service catalog drilldown to see the root cause.
- The distinction between **Critical (Red 🟥)** and **Warning (Yellow 🟨)** is the most important part of this feature. Base the alert priority on the impact to the end-user or the business, not just the technical component.
- Avoid setting alert thresholds that are too sensitive, which can lead to a constantly "flapping" health status (switching between green, yellow, and red).

## Next steps

Need richer rules across multiple metrics? Switch to [Policy-based service health](https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/apm/features/service-health/policy-based-service-health/index.md), which evaluates services against composite health policies.