Alert Fatigue

In depth

Alert fatigue typically begins with well-meaning monitors that alert on every threshold breach, regardless of duration or impact. Within weeks, the on-call rotation learns to ignore the noise — and then misses a real incident buried in the same channel.

Fixes include: confirm-and-retry logic before alerting, severity-aware routing (only critical alerts page the on-call), grouping related alerts into a single incident, and regular reviews of the noisiest monitors with a bias toward deleting them.

Why it matters

Every false alert is a tax on the team's attention. A monitoring system that emits 50 alerts a day is worse than one that emits 5, even if the 50-alert system technically catches more. Quality of alerting beats quantity every time.