---
title: "Alert Fatigue — monitoring glossary"
description: "Alert fatigue is the desensitisation that happens when an on-call team receives too many alerts, especially false positives. It causes real incidents to be…"
canonical: "https://lemwatch.com/glossary/alert-fatigue"
source: "https://lemwatch.com"
---

# Alert Fatigue

> Alert fatigue is the desensitisation that happens when an on-call team receives too many alerts, especially false positives. It causes real incidents to be missed, slows MTTR, and burns out engineers.

## Definition

 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.

 See it in the product: [Smart alerting](https://lemwatch.com/features).


## Related

- [Monitoring glossary](https://lemwatch.com/glossary)
- [Incident](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/incident)
- [Website Monitoring](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/monitoring)
- [False Positive](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/false-positive)
- [Core Web Vitals](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/core-web-vitals)
- [LCP](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/lcp)
- [All monitoring checks](https://lemwatch.com/features)
- [Broken Link](https://lemwatch.com/glossary/broken-link)