The text elaborates on the critical distinction between business intelligence dashboards and real-time alerts, emphasizing the latter's ability to provide immediate responses to ongoing events, which gives businesses a competitive advantage. It advocates for a shift from reactive monitoring to proactive alerting using Apache Kafka®, a framework for building streaming architectures, to implement automated alerts that can detect anomalies and initiate actions before issues escalate. The guide details various alert patterns such as threshold, anomaly detection, and composite event alerts, highlighting their applications in industries like finance, retail, logistics, and security. It stresses the importance of designing trustworthy alerts that avoid alert fatigue through intelligent filtering and prioritization, ensuring timely and actionable notifications. The text also underscores the value of integrating these alerts into broader automation and AI-driven systems to enhance business processes by maintaining operations at machine speed, ultimately reducing risks and operational costs.