Our Alerts Are Noise: How Do We Actually Fix Alert Fatigue?

Alert fatigue is a significant issue in modern engineering teams, leading to missed incidents and a lack of trust in alerting systems due to the overwhelming number of irrelevant alerts. The problem often arises from using default alerts from SaaS vendors, lack of ownership over alert management, and focusing on system metrics rather than user experience. The article advocates for a shift to SLO-based alerting, which emphasizes alerting only when user experience is at risk, by using Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), error budgets, and burn rate alerts. It explains the process of setting up dual-window burn rate alerts that balance sensitivity and specificity by combining short and long-term checks to reduce false positives and capture slow-burn issues. Practical steps include defining SLIs, setting SLOs, calculating burn rate thresholds, and writing dual-window alert rules while emphasizing alert hygiene practices like maintaining runbooks, reviewing alerts quarterly, and routing by severity. This approach aims to reduce noise, restore trust in alerting systems, and ultimately improve the on-call experience by ensuring that alerts are meaningful and actionable.

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