Practice : Alert Fatigue Management
Purpose and Strategic Importance
Alert Fatigue Management ensures that alerts remain meaningful, actionable, and trusted - not overwhelming. When teams are bombarded with low-value alerts, they become desensitised and slower to respond, risking missed incidents and burnout.
By curating and improving alert quality, engineering teams can reduce cognitive load, improve incident response times, and focus energy where it matters most - leading to more resilient systems and happier operators.
Description of the Practice
- Alert fatigue occurs when teams receive too many alerts, false positives, or unactionable notifications.
- Symptoms include ignored alerts, missed critical signals, and burnout among on-call responders.
- Management involves refining thresholds, consolidating alerts, suppressing noise, and aligning alerts to real business impact.
- It also includes setting expectations for on-call coverage, escalations, and follow-up actions.
How to Practise It (Playbook)
1. Getting Started
- Review recent alerts and classify them: actionable vs. noise.
- Identify alert sources that trigger frequently without requiring human intervention.
- Suppress known benign conditions and define thresholds for what constitutes real impact.
- Group related alerts into incidents to reduce noise and improve context.
2. Scaling and Maturing
- Use alert deduplication, suppression windows, and intelligent correlation (e.g. with tools like PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or Prometheus Alertmanager).
- Create alerting SLOs: target alert frequency, resolution time, and false positive rate.
- Tune alerts continuously based on feedback from responders and postmortems.
- Automate common remediations and turn alerts into observability-as-code.
- Empower teams to own and refine their alerting configurations.
3. Team Behaviours to Encourage
- Treat alert fatigue as a systems problem - not operator error.
- Regularly review and retire stale alerts during ops reviews or game days.
- Encourage everyone to report noisy alerts and propose improvements.
- Focus alerts on symptoms that users or systems would actually notice.
4. Watch Out For…
- “Set it and forget it” alerts that accumulate over time.
- Misaligned alerts that reflect internal metrics but not customer impact.
- Overcompensation - too few alerts that hide genuine issues.
- Lack of clarity in alerts - vague messages that slow diagnosis.
5. Signals of Success
- On-call responders receive fewer, higher-quality alerts.
- Alert fatigue decreases, and confidence in signals increases.
- Critical issues are detected and acted on quickly.
- Alert review becomes a normal part of operational hygiene.
- Engineers feel safe, supported, and in control during incidents.