Review action policy execution history

In Kibana Universal Alerting, action policy execution history shows dispatcher decisions from the last 24 hours across all action policies in the space, so you can confirm notifications are dispatching as expected or investigate unexpected notification behavior.

Go to Alerting → Execution History in the Observability navigation menu, or find Execution History using the global search field. Then select the Action policies tab. Each row covers one dispatcher run for one action policy, grouped by the rule whose alerts it processed:

Column Description
Timestamp When the dispatcher ran.
Action policy The action policy that the dispatcher evaluated.
Outcome Whether the dispatcher invoked a workflow: Dispatched, Throttled, or Failed. Definitions are in Dispatch outcomes.
Rules The rule whose alerts the action policy processed.
Alerts The number of alerts processed in this run.
Action groups The number of action groups involved.
Workflows The workflows invoked, if any.

You can search records by action policy name, rule name, or saved-object ID, and filter by outcome to view only dispatched, throttled, or failed records.

After each dispatcher run, Kibana records an outcome for each action policy in the event log. The Action policies tab shows these outcomes:

Outcome Event-log value (event.action) What it means
Dispatched dispatched The dispatcher invoked a workflow for the alert.
Throttled throttled The alert matched an action policy but was rate-limited by the frequency setting, so no workflow ran. This is expected behavior, not an error.
Failed dispatch_failed The dispatcher failed to invoke the workflow, so no workflow ran. The row shows the failure reason: missing_api_key, workflow_not_found, workflow_disabled, schedule_error, or license_not_supported. The outcome's tooltip shows the error message.

When no action policy matches an alert, the event log records unmatched, and no workflow runs. These records don't appear in the execution history. To find them, open Discover and query .kibana-event-log-* with event.provider: "alerting_v2" and event.action: "unmatched".

Note

Alerts that are acknowledged, snoozed, resolved, or covered by a maintenance window fail the eligibility check, so the dispatcher doesn't evaluate action policies for them. They don't appear in the execution history.

The dispatched, throttled, and unmatched outcomes are the event-log terms written to .kibana-event-log-*. The .alert-actions data stream records the same events using different terms. The mapping is:

Event-log outcome (event.action) .alert-actions action_type Meaning
dispatched fire and notified Policy matched, frequency cleared, workflow invoked. Kibana writes fire for each dispatched alert and notified for each workflow invocation.
throttled suppress Policy matched but frequency limit not yet cleared. No workflow invoked.
unmatched unmatched No action policy matched the alert. No workflow invoked.

.alert-actions also records triage actions (ack, unack, assign, tag, snooze, unsnooze, activate, deactivate). These have no event-log counterpart, because they aren't dispatcher outcomes. For the full field reference, refer to Action type values.

Note

The suppress action type covers more than the throttled outcome does, because the dispatcher also writes suppress for alerts that fail the eligibility check. To tell the cases apart, check the reason field. Throttled alerts have suppressed by throttled policy <policy ID>, and alerts that failed the eligibility check have ack, snooze, deactivate, or maintenance_window:<window ID>.