Interpret healthy, watch, and concerning load colors
Read green, amber, and red queue metrics without confusing them with incident severity.
Last checked 20 August 2026
Queue Status colors individual values to help you scan for local workload pressure:
- Green means good.
- Amber means watch.
- Red means concern.
The thresholds are specific to each metric. A red number does not mean the scheduler failed, and it does not create an SEO incident. Queue colors are separate from Advisory, Warning, and Critical statuses and do not affect Health Score.
Queue table thresholds
For each queue, the backlog threshold is:
max(8, Workers × 3)
Waiting Jobs
- Green: zero
- Amber: above zero but below the backlog threshold
- Red: at or above the backlog threshold
Active Jobs
- Green: fewer active jobs than workers
- Amber: active jobs equal or exceed workers, with no waiting jobs
- Red: active jobs equal or exceed workers, with waiting work present
Workers
The Workers value uses the Waiting Jobs tone. Red workers means the queue is backlogged relative to its concurrency. It does not mean worker processes have crashed.
Website Pressure thresholds
Pages
- Green: 0-19 enabled pages
- Amber: 20-39
- Red: 40 or more
Queued
- Green: zero queued pages
- Amber: 1-7
- Red: eight or more
Unlike the queue table's scaled backlog threshold, the website Queued column always turns red at eight. It counts that site's enabled pages that are waiting or active in the Page checks queue.
Schedule
- Amber: Every 15 minutes or Mixed
- Green: Hourly, Daily, or Weekly
There is no red Schedule state. Mixed is highlighted because the per-page intervals deserve inspection. It is not automatically a bad configuration.
Checks / day
- Green: 0-99
- Amber: 100-199
- Red: 200 or more
Avg check
- No color: Not yet
- Green: less than 7.5 seconds
- Amber: at least 7.5 seconds but less than 15 seconds
- Red: 15 seconds or more
The display rounds durations for readability, but classification uses the underlying milliseconds.
HTML
- Green: less than 125,000 bytes
- Amber: 125,000-249,999 bytes
- Red: 250,000 bytes or more
This value is total stored gzipped HTML for the website's enabled pages. Displayed KB or MB values are rounded, while the color uses exact bytes.
Pressure
- Green: score below 25 with no flags
- Amber: score at least 25, or at least one pressure flag
- Red: score at least 80, or at least three pressure flags
Flags are queued pages, slow pages, large HTML pages, frequent checks, and many pages. A score above a threshold and a flag are alternative conditions, not requirements that must both be met.
Use colors as trends
Queue Status refreshes every 10 seconds. A short amber or red state can be normal after the app starts, the computer wakes, connectivity returns, pages are added in bulk, or several manual checks are requested.
Read the value and its direction:
- Falling Waiting Jobs usually means the queue is recovering.
- Red Active Jobs with falling Waiting Jobs means all capacity is being used to drain work.
- Red Waiting Jobs that continue rising indicate sustained pressure.
- An amber schedule with green Queued and Pressure values may require no action.
- A red page or frequency value can be acceptable when the queue drains and the computer remains responsive.
Colors are prompts to investigate, not automatic recommendations to increase workers. For Page checks, first inspect Website Pressure and remove unnecessary frequency or coverage. Raise Concurrent Crawls only when the computer has spare capacity. For externally constrained queues, more local concurrency may not help.