What you will learn
- Alert on user-facing symptoms
- Reduce alert fatigue
- Route to on-call
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The basics, in plain English
An alert is an automatic message that warns you when something is wrong, so you do not have to stare at dashboards all day. On-call means being the person responsible for answering those alerts during a shift. Good alerts wake you only for things that truly matter.
- Alert
- An automatic notification that fires when a metric crosses a danger line.
- Threshold
- The limit that, once crossed, triggers an alert.
- On-call
- Taking turns being the person who responds when alerts fire.
- Paging
- Urgently contacting the on-call person, often by phone, for serious problems.
- Alert fatigue
- Getting so many noisy alerts that you start ignoring them, which is dangerous.
- Escalation
- Passing an unanswered alert to the next person up the chain.
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Good alerts
Alert on what users feel, not every blip. Every page should be actionable. Noisy alerts cause fatigue and missed real incidents.
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