Alerting: What Pages and What Becomes a Ticket

1. Alert Fatigue Is a Design Failure

Every team with a bad on-call rotation describes the problem the same way: there are too many alerts, most of them are noise, and people have learned to ignore the channel.

That is usually treated as a discipline problem, solved by asking everybody to be more careful. It is not. It is a design failure with a specific cause, which is that alerts were added one at a time, each in response to one incident, and nothing was ever removed.

The mechanism is worth stating because it explains why the problem always returns.

• An incident happens