Understand Advisory, Good, Warning, and Critical statuses

Learn what the four TechDash status levels mean and which ones notify.

Last checked 21 August 2026

TechDash uses four customer-facing status labels: Advisory, Good, Warning, and Critical. They map to the four bars in the TechDash mark and appear across check results, incidents, in-app messages, and reports.

Good describes a healthy result or recovery. Advisory, Warning, and Critical describe increasing levels of attention for an open incident.

Good

Good means the observed condition passed, remains healthy, or recovered after a failure. A later Good result can close an open incident automatically.

If Notifications > Notify when a check recovers is On, TechDash can send a recovery message for a previously notifiable failure. Recovery notifications also respect the applicable desktop, webhook, page, and rule settings.

You do not see a separate open Good incident in the Incidents list. Good is the healthy state that prevents or resolves an incident.

Advisory

Advisory highlights information, an opportunity, or a lower-risk change worth reviewing. It is useful for change intelligence that should remain visible without being treated like an urgent fault.

Built-in Advisory incidents appear in Incidents but do not send desktop or webhook alerts. This keeps routine observations visible without interrupting you. A customer-created rule under Custom Checks is different: you choose its Advisory, Warning, or Critical level and whether that custom rule should notify.

Warning

Warning indicates a meaningful issue that should be investigated. It can represent a technical fault, a risky change, or a time-sensitive condition that has not reached its most urgent threshold.

Built-in Warning incidents can send desktop and configured webhook notifications when the relevant channel settings allow them. Warning incidents also reduce the Health Score more than Advisory incidents.

Critical

Critical is the highest incident level. It is used for high-impact conditions such as a monitored page returning an error, a newly introduced noindex directive, an invalid TLS certificate, a DNS failure, or Google reporting that it cannot fetch a page.

Critical incidents can send desktop and enabled webhook notifications and have the greatest incident weight in the Health Score. Critical does not mean TechDash automatically changes the website. Open the incident to review evidence and apply the appropriate fix.

Severity can change

Some checks can escalate. SSL and domain expiry can move from Warning to Critical as the date gets closer, with each threshold able to create a new notification transition. Other incidents recover when a later check passes.

TechDash sets the level for built-in checks. For a Custom Check, you select Advisory, Warning, or Critical and separately decide whether the rule should notify. Changing the level does not change how often its target page is crawled.

How status affects Health Score

Health Report calculates each website's live score from its enabled page count and open incidents. Advisory, Warning, and Critical incidents use weights of 1, 4, and 10 respectively. Select View calculation on a website's report to see the values behind its score.

A low score is a prioritisation signal, not a replacement for the incident evidence. Open Incidents to see the affected checks and URLs.

Status versus queue load colors

Queue Status also uses green, amber, and red to describe healthy, watch, and concerning workload. Those values describe scheduler pressure, waiting jobs, and website load. They do not assign Good, Warning, or Critical severity to an SEO issue.

Similarly, a website can have no Critical incidents but still show concerning queue pressure because too many checks are waiting.

If a notification does not match expectations

  1. Open the incident and confirm whether it is Advisory, Warning, or Critical.
  2. For a custom rule, review its chosen severity and notify option.
  3. Open Notifications and confirm the channel is configured.
  4. Review the monitored page's per-channel settings.
  5. Check Ignored Checks for a matching suppression rule.

An incident can exist without producing a banner when its level or notification settings intentionally suppress alerts.

If a Warning or Critical incident still behaves differently from its visible notification settings after a test notification succeeds, open Help & Support. Include the TechDash version, operating system, incident check name and severity, affected hostname and path, enabled channels, page notification toggles, ignored-rule state, and whether recovery notifications are enabled. Do not include webhook URLs.

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