Error and warning messages

Error and warning messages can appear in various places in a UI, including in banners, in screens, or after a field. Error or warning messages can span many reasons, including when there's no data, permissions issues, configuration issues, or unsupported actions.

When writing an error or warning message, use these guidelines:

• Clearly state the problem and what the user can do to resolve it. If cues in the UI help identify the problem for field validation errors, like text color and placement next to the field, it's okay to write the message without explicitly stating the problem.
• Use complete sentences with terminal punctuation.
• Don't use "please".
• It's okay to use passive voice to avoid placing blame on the user.

The following table shows examples of what to do and what not to do when writing error messages:

Do this	Don't do this
Enter your email address.	Your email address hasn't been entered.
Username not found. Verify that the username is correct and try again.	You entered the wrong username.
The maximum number of concurrent searches has been reached. Decrease the number of concurrent searches or increase search concurrency limits in limits.conf.	Max number of concurrent searches reached.
WARN DistributedPeerManager - Unable to distribute to peer named xxxx at http://xxxx:8089 because authentication failed. Make sure adequate system resources are available on the target server.	WARN DistributedPeerManager - Unable to distribute to peer named xxxx at uri http://xxxx:8089 because peer has status = "Authentication Failed".
No data found. Try changing the filters or specifying a new time range. To start instrumenting a new application, see APM instrumentation.	No data found.
You don't have the necessary permissions to view subscription usage. Contact your Splunk administrator.	You don't have permission to perform this action.
Runtime metrics aren't available for this service. To view runtime metrics, instrument your application to send spans to Splunk APM. See Instrument back-end application documentation.	You haven't instrumented your application to see runtime metrics.