The sound of silence is better than the sound of false alarms.
Why Engineers Ignore Alerts
You spent $200k on Datadog/NewRelic. Your engineers created 500 alerts. Now, they have created an email rule to auto-archive all alerts.
The Signal-to-Noise Ratio
If I get woken up at 3 AM for a "Low Disk Space" warning on a temp folder, and I do nothing and go back to sleep... I have trained my brain that PagerDuty = Annoyance, not Danger.
Flappy Alerts
An alert that fires, resolves itself in 2 minutes, and fires again 10 minutes later. This is psychological torture. Fix: Implement "Hysteresis" (Must be broken for >5 minutes to alert) or "Holt-Winters" prediction (Anomaly detection) rather than static thresholds.
No Runbooks
An alert fires: "Error Code 5432". The engineer stares at it. "What does that mean?" Every alert MUST link to a specific Playbook:
- What impact does this have?
- How to verify it?
- How to mitigate (restart X, rollback Y)? If you don't know the playbook, do not create the alert. Log it instead.