Smart Alerts: Protecting focus without sacrificing critical coverage

Alerting systems are crucial yet fragile components in managing modern always-on systems, as ineffective alerts can lead to alert fatigue and missed incidents, impacting engineers' trust and response times. New Relic's Smart Alerts aim to enhance alerting by reducing false positives and improving detection accuracy through historical behavior analysis rather than relying on static thresholds, which often require constant manual tuning and can cause inconsistencies across dynamic environments. These alerts are designed to maintain broad alert coverage without increasing cognitive load on engineers, allowing them to focus on genuine issues. Smart Alerts do not perform root cause analysis or provide incident context, but rather focus on the initial detection phase, ensuring alerts are credible and timely. This feature integrates with existing operational practices without requiring teams to overhaul their current workflows, offering a scalable and sustainable solution for modern system reliability.