What makes a good alert, and how do you avoid alert fatigue? [Basic]
Answer
A good alert is actionable, urgent, owned, accurate, and tied to user impact. To avoid alert fatigue, I page only for conditions that require immediate human action and route non-urgent issues to tickets or dashboards.
Technical explanation
Every page should have a clear owner, severity, runbook, dashboard link, and expected first action.
Deduplicate related alerts and inhibit downstream noise when a known upstream dependency is failing.
Review noisy alerts after incidents and regularly delete alerts that are not useful.
Hands-on example
Hands-on alert review: export last 30 days of pages, group by alert name and service, calculate pages per service and percent actionable, then remove or downgrade alerts with no action taken. Add runbooks to the top 10 remaining alerts.
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