5 common sources of alert fatigue for SRE and DevOps teams

Alert fatigue is a common issue for on-call Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and DevOps teams, resulting from the continuous influx of notifications that are often neither urgent nor actionable, leading to productivity loss due to frequent context switching. These alerts often stem from irrelevant notifications, low-priority issues, flapping and duplicate alerts, and correlated alerts that lack sufficient context to identify root causes. Addressing this noise is crucial, as it can obscure genuinely critical problems within complex production systems. New Relic's AIOps platform, still in private beta, offers a solution by utilizing machine learning-driven filters to streamline alerts, enhance incident correlation, and prioritize issues, thereby reducing pager fatigue and allowing teams to concentrate on essential tasks. Guy Fighel, the General Manager of Applied Intelligence at New Relic, emphasizes that while these insights reflect his personal views, they aim to provide guidance on improving alert management in dynamic environments.