Understand incident severity and notification behavior

Distinguish Advisory, Warning, and Critical incidents and their alert behavior.

Last checked 21 August 2026

TechDash assigns every open incident one of three importance levels: Advisory, Warning, or Critical. The level helps you choose what to investigate first. It also affects notifications and Health Score, but it does not replace your knowledge of the website.

What each level means

Advisory

An Advisory records useful change intelligence, an opportunity, or a lower-risk regression. Examples include a title change, a newly detected capability, or a condition that deserves review without interrupting you.

Built-in Advisory incidents stay visible in Incidents, but they do not send desktop, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Discord notifications. A Custom Check is different: turning Notify On can make it notify even when its selected severity is Advisory.

Warning

A Warning identifies a meaningful problem that should be investigated. Warning incidents can use the enabled desktop and webhook channels. Examples include many SEO regressions, invalid targets, and conditions that could affect crawling or search performance.

Critical

A Critical incident represents the highest product priority. Critical is used for severe access, availability, indexability, certificate, DNS, or similar failures. Critical incidents can notify through enabled channels and have the greatest effect on Health Score.

Good is not an open incident level. A pass is the result of a check that found no qualifying failure. Good is the healthy status TechDash presents for that pass or for a recovery after a previous failure. Passing checks do not appear in Incidents, do not reduce Health Score, and do not send failure notifications.

How notifications are decided

Severity is only one part of notification delivery:

Built-in Warning and Critical failures are eligible to notify. Built-in Advisory failures are not.
The relevant global channel must be configured and enabled.
For page checks, that channel must also be enabled for the monitored page.
A page-check alert is created when the result changes from pass to fail. The first observed failure can appear in Incidents without sending a transition alert.
Repeated checks that keep returning the same failure do not repeatedly notify.
A Custom Check follows its own Notify control.
Recovery notifications are optional under Notifications > Notify when a check recovers.

Some incidents can become more severe while remaining open. TechDash sends another failure event when an existing notifiable incident moves to a higher severity. Expiry findings are a common example because their severity changes as the date approaches.

How severity affects Health Score

Open incidents are weighted in the live Health Score calculation:

Advisory: 1
Warning: 4
Critical: 10

The score also uses the number of monitored pages, so severity weights are not points subtracted directly from 100. Critical incidents exert more pressure than Warnings, and Warnings exert more pressure than Advisories. A lower score is a triage signal, not a direct measurement of lost revenue, traffic, or rankings.

Prioritize with context

Start with Critical incidents, then Warnings, but always open the incident and read its evidence. Consider whether the condition can stop customers reaching or completing a journey, expose insecure access, prevent search engines crawling or indexing content, or reduce search visibility. A Warning on a high-value checkout or lead-generation page can matter more to your business than a Critical issue on an intentionally retired test URL. Check whether the affected URL, deployment timing, and observed value fit an intentional change before acting.

For built-in checks, TechDash sets severity according to the built-in severity rules and current condition. For a Custom Check, you choose Advisory, Warning, or Critical. Choose the lowest level that accurately reflects the consequence of the condition so that urgent incidents remain easy to identify.