Monitoring is a crucial aspect of managing complex systems, and alerts play a vital role in this process. An alert is a notice to take immediate action regarding an issue, but it should be designed to respect employees' time, provide context, and be urgent and non-optional. Alerts that don't require human intervention are not alerts, but rather automation or reports. A good monitoring tool should enable the creation of event flags that feed back into the monitoring system, providing valuable context for resolving issues. To improve alerts, it's essential to have an open conversation with the recipients, reviewing and adjusting trigger conditions and actions as needed. Effective alerting is not just about generating alerts, but also about understanding how they relate to observability and monitoring.