---
title: Service health
description: The Health tab rolls a service's latency, span error rate, cases, and logs error rate policies into a single health state, and lets you tune the thresholds behind each one.
url: https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/apm-v2/features/service-health/
product: apm
feature: APM Overview
feature_id: apm-general
feature_identifier: apm/apm-general
last_updated: '2026-11-09'
---

# Monitor service health

APM rolls every health signal for a service into a single state - shown in the service catalog and on the service itself - so you can tell at a glance which services need attention. The **Health** tab explains that state: it lists the monitoring policies behind it and lets you tune the thresholds that decide it. The Health tab is available for services.

Use it to:

* **Triage fast**: see whether a service is critical or warning, and which policy is driving the state.
* **Tune health to your service**: adjust the warning and critical thresholds so the state reflects real user impact.
* **Set an account-wide baseline**: save a policy for every service, then override it per service where it needs different thresholds.
* **Act on a breach**: jump from a policy straight to an alert, its query, the Metric Explorer, or the service's cases.

[![The Health tab: P95 latency with N/A as its current value and status, Span error rate and Cases Healthy, and Logs error rate Critical, each with its thresholds and an Enabled toggle](/docs/assets/images/health-tab-26a00720b467a42adbd0125ed8786de7.webp)](https://coralogix.com/docs/assets/images/health-tab-26a00720b467a42adbd0125ed8786de7.webp)

## What you need

* Coralogix [Application Performance Monitoring (APM)](https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/apm-v2/getting-started/apm-onboarding-tutorial.md) installed and configured.
* [Span Metrics](https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/apm-v2/getting-started/span-metrics.md) enabled for the service: the latency and span error rate policies read span metrics.
* The logs error rate policy evaluates logs correlated to the service, and the cases policy evaluates cases open on it.

## Health states

* **Critical**: at least one policy is breached.
* **Warning**: at least one policy is at risk.
* **Healthy**: every policy with data is within range.
* **N/A**: policies are enabled, but none of them has data to evaluate, for example on an inactive service or in an environment the service sends no data from.
* **Unmonitored**: no policy is enabled for the service.

A policy with no data shows **N/A** and doesn't count toward the service's state, so a service is scored from the policies that have data. A service shows **N/A** only when none of its enabled policies has data. Health is also evaluated per environment, so a service can be Healthy in one environment and N/A in another.

A service's overall state is the worst state across its policies: a single critical policy makes the whole service critical. In the drilldown, the **Health policies** section header summarizes the tab as a count of how many policies are critical, warning, healthy, N/A, and unmonitored.

## Access the Health tab

1. In your Coralogix toolbar, select **APM**.
2. Select a service to open its drilldown, then select the **Health** tab.

The Health tab is available for services. Databases don't have it.

## Health policies

APM evaluates a set of predefined policies against each service. Each policy compares a metric to a warning and a critical threshold over a rolling time window. The Health tab lists four:

| Policy          | What it measures                                                                                                     |
| --------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Latency         | Request latency at the selected aggregation. The row is named for the aggregation in force, such as **P95 latency**. |
| Span error rate | Share of spans that ended in an error.                                                                               |
| Cases           | Active cases on the service, by severity (P5-P1).                                                                    |
| Logs error rate | Share of log entries emitted at error level.                                                                         |

Note

These are the four policies the Health tab tunes. A service's health badge in the [catalog](https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/apm-v2/services.md) can also reflect its apdex score and SLO compliance - both configured elsewhere, and neither appears as a policy here.

## The Health table

The Health tab lists every policy in a table with these columns:

* **Name**: the policy. The latency row is named for its aggregation: for example, P95 latency.
* **Description**: what the policy monitors.
* **Threshold**: the policy's warning and critical thresholds.
* **Current value**: the policy's live value over the selected time range. The Cases policy shows a count of open cases.
* **Status**: Healthy, Warning, Critical, N/A, or Unmonitored. A policy with no data shows **N/A** as both its current value and its status. A disabled policy shows a dash as its current value and **Unmonitored** as its status.
* **Enabled**: a toggle that turns the policy on or off.

### Enable or disable a policy

Use the **Enabled** toggle to turn a policy on or off in place. Turning one off opens a **Disable policy?** confirmation - *This policy will no longer affect Service Health. You can re-enable it at any time.* Select **Disable policy** to confirm, or **Discard changes** to leave it on. A disabled policy stops affecting health and shows as Unmonitored, with a dash for its current value, until you re-enable it.

### More actions

Each row's **More actions** menu offers:

* **Edit policy**: open the policy editor to change how the policy decides health. See [Tune a policy](#tune-a-policy).
* **View query**: show the query behind the policy.
* **Create alert**: create a metric alert from the policy's query.
* **Open in Metric Explorer**: open the policy's metric in the Metric Explorer.
* **View cases**: open the service's cases. This appears for the Cases policy only.

Which items appear also depends on your permissions - see [Permissions](#permissions).

## Tune a policy

[![The Edit health policy drawer: Details (policy name and description), the Apply this change to scope, and the Conditions setting the Critical and Warning thresholds over a rolling time window.](/docs/assets/images/policy-editor-c4472b775d09a788cae8fbaaca9fb1dd.webp)](https://coralogix.com/docs/assets/images/policy-editor-c4472b775d09a788cae8fbaaca9fb1dd.webp)

Select a policy **row** (or press **Enter**), or use **More actions** then **Edit policy**, to open **Edit health policy** - a drawer that changes how a policy decides the service's health. Its toolbar has a breadcrumb, **Full screen** (and **Exit full screen**) to expand the drawer, and **Close**. The editor sets:

* **Details**: the policy **name** (read-only) and an optional **description**.
* **Apply this change to**: choose **This service (*name*)** to write a threshold for this service only, leaving the account default and every other service untouched, or **All services** to save the policy as the account default used by every service that has no policy of its own. A service's own policy always takes precedence over the account default.
* **Conditions**: a condition reads *When {aggregation} {metric} over a rolling time window of {window} is...* For a latency policy, pick the **aggregation** (**Avg**, **P90**, **P95**, or **P99**) and the **rolling time window** (**1 min**, **5 min**, **10 min**, or **15 min**), then set the value above which **health status becomes Critical** and the value above which it **becomes Warning**, each with a unit (**μs**, **ms**, or **s**); otherwise the status stays **Healthy**. The Cases policy sets a case priority (**P1**-**P5**) at each level and has no window. The warning threshold must be lower than the critical threshold.
* **Active**: a toggle that turns the policy on or off.

Select **Save policy** to apply your changes.

## Permissions

Editing health policies requires permission to update the service catalog. Without it:

* **Edit policy** doesn't appear in the More actions menu.
* The **Enabled** toggle is disabled, with the tooltip *You don't have permission to change health policies.*

**View cases**, **Create alert**, and **Open in Metric Explorer** likewise appear only when you have the matching permission - to read cases, update metric alerts, or open the Metric Explorer.

## Next steps

Break a service's performance down per transaction in [Transactions](https://coralogix.com/docs/user-guides/apm-v2/features/transactions.md).