This blog post explores methods to reduce alert fatigue, a feeling of annoyance caused by excessive alerts, for on-call staff. It details the concept of alert suppression and provides actionable tips to implement it in two areas:
Tuning alerts at the monitoring system: Set appropriate thresholds, avoid over-monitoring, and implement tiered alerts.
Optimizing notification with your on-call tool: Deduplicate alerts, route them to the right people, suppress low-priority alerts, and utilize maintenance windows.
The blog also recommends additional tips like using advanced monitoring tools, promoting alert ownership, and regularly reviewing alerts for continued effectiveness. By implementing these methods, you can significantly reduce alert noise and ensure your on-call staff is focused on resolving critical issues.
Getting paged in the middle of the night for non-critical alerts can be frustrating for anyone on-call for incident response. This blog post explores methods to reduce alert fatigue and optimize your on-call experience through alert suppression.
What is Alert Fatigue?
Alert fatigue refers to the feeling of annoyance and stress caused by a high volume of alerts, many of which may not be critical. This can lead to:
- Delayed response to critical incidents
- Ignoring important alerts altogether
- Burnout among on-call staff
How to Reduce Alert Noise with Alert Suppression
There are two main areas to tackle alert noise:
- Tuning alerts at the monitoring system:
- Set the right thresholds: Not all metrics require alerts. Focus on core system reliability metrics and set thresholds that trigger alerts only when there’s a genuine cause for concern.
- Avoid over-monitoring: While collecting extensive metrics is valuable for observability, avoid setting alerts on every single one. Categorize metrics as alerting or non-alerting for better prioritization.
- Implement incremental alerts: Set up tiered alerts. For instance, an alert for 70% CPU usage can serve as a heads-up, while an 80% alert signifies a more urgent need for intervention.
- Optimizing alert notification with your on-call tool:
- Deduplicate alerts: Repeated alerts for the same issue can be overwhelming. Configure deduplication rules to notify your team only on the first occurrence.
- Route alerts to the right people: Utilize tagging to categorize alerts and route them to the most suitable team member based on severity or expertise required.
- Suppress low-priority alerts: For informational alerts that don’t require immediate action, use suppression rules to prevent unnecessary notifications while still logging the events for future reference.
- Maintenance windows: Silence alerts for specific services during scheduled maintenance periods to avoid false positives.
By implementing these alert suppression techniques, you can significantly reduce alert noise and ensure your on-call staff is focused on resolving critical issues.
Additional Tips for Reducing Alert Noise
- Invest in the right monitoring tools: Look for tools with robust alerting features that allow for granular control over thresholds, notifications, and routing.
- Promote a culture of alert ownership: Encourage engineers to take responsibility for the alerts their code generates. This can lead to better understanding of root causes and improved monitoring practices.
- Regularly review and update alerts: Monitoring systems and applications are constantly evolving. Regularly assess your alerts to ensure they remain relevant and effective.
By following these practices, you can create a more efficient and less stressful on-call experience for your team.
Squadcast is an Incident Management tool that’s purpose-built for SRE. Get rid of unwanted alerts, receive relevant notifications and integrate with popular ChatOps tools. Work in collaboration using virtual incident war rooms and use automation to eliminate toil.
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