---
title: "How rules are evaluated within a group | Grafana Cloud documentation"
description: "An alert instance is considered stale when its series disappears for a number of consecutive evaluation intervals. Learn how Grafana resolves them."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# How rules are evaluated within a group

Each evaluation group contains an **evaluation interval** that determines how frequently the rule is evaluated. For instance, the evaluation may occur every `10s`, `30s`, `1m`, `10m`, etc.

Rules in different evaluation groups can be evaluated simultaneously.

Rules within the same evaluation group can be evaluated simultaneously or sequentially, depending on the rule type:

- **Grafana-managed** rules within the same group are evaluated concurrently—they are evaluated at different times over the same evaluation interval but display the same evaluation timestamp.
- **Data source-managed** rules within the same group are evaluated sequentially, one after the other—this is useful to ensure that recording rules are evaluated before alert rules.
- **Grafana-managed rules [imported from data source-managed rules](/docs/grafana-cloud/observe-and-act/alert-and-measure-reliability/alerting/alerting-rules/alerting-migration/)** are also evaluated sequentially, in the order they appear in the original rule group. Grafana runs them as an evaluation sequence: each rule starts after the previous one finishes. This preserves the evaluation order when a rule depends on a preceding recording rule.

For Grafana-managed rules that depend on recording rule results, you can define an explicit evaluation order with a rule sequence. The sequence evaluates recording rules first, followed by alert rules, at a shared interval. For instructions, refer to [Configure rule sequences](/docs/grafana-cloud/observe-and-act/alert-and-measure-reliability/alerting/alerting-rules/rule-sequences/).