---
title: Adding conditions to actions
description: When a watch is triggered, its condition determines whether or not to execute the watch actions. Within each action, you can also add a condition per...
url: https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/4236/explore-analyze/alerts-cases/watcher/action-conditions
products:
  - Elasticsearch
---

# Adding conditions to actions
When a watch is triggered, its condition determines whether or not to execute the watch actions. Within each action, you can also add a condition per action. These additional conditions enable a single alert to execute different actions depending on a their respective conditions. The following watch would always send an email, when hits are found from the input search, but only trigger the `notify_pager` action when there are more than 5 hits in the search result.
```json

{
  "trigger" : {
    "schedule" : { "interval" : "5m" }
  },
  "input" : {
    "search" : {
      "request" : {
        "indices" : "log-events",
        "body" : {
          "size" : 0,
          "query" : { "match" : { "status" : "error" } }
        }
      }
    }
  },
  "condition" : {
    "compare" : { "ctx.payload.hits.total" : { "gt" : 0 } }
  },
  "actions" : {
    "email_administrator" : {
      "email" : {
        "to" : "sys.admino@host.domain",
        "subject" : "Encountered {{ctx.payload.hits.total}} errors",
        "body" : "Too many error in the system, see attached data",
        "attachments" : {
          "attached_data" : {
            "data" : {
              "format" : "json"
            }
          }
        },
        "priority" : "high"
      }
    },
    "notify_pager" : {
      "condition": { <1>
        "compare" : { "ctx.payload.hits.total" : { "gt" : 5 } }
      },
      "webhook" : {
        "method" : "POST",
        "host" : "pager.service.domain",
        "port" : 1234,
        "path" : "/{{watch_id}}",
        "body" : "Encountered {{ctx.payload.hits.total}} errors"
      }
    }
  }
}
```