8.2 Alerting that people will actually answer
Your alerts fire on user-visible problems and almost never on noise.
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An alert is a promise that a human will act, and this topic is about keeping alerts worth that promise: symptom-based firing on user-visible problems, thresholds and burn rates tuned against fatigue, a runbook attached to every alert, and escalation a small team can honestly staff. It follows the signals topic because alerts are built on them. The failure it guards against is the noisy pager — every false alarm spends the attention that a real incident will one day need, and attention does not refill.
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Symptom-based alerting over cause-based
Alerting on what users experience rather than on internal causes produces far fewer pages and catches more real problems. A processor at high usage is not by itself a problem worth waking someone for.
Thresholds, burn rates and alert fatigue
How quickly you are consuming your allowance for failure is a better trigger than a fixed threshold, because it distinguishes a brief blip from steady damage. Alert fatigue is what happens when this distinction is not made.
Runbooks attached to every alert
An alert without instructions attached asks the responder to reinvent the diagnosis at the worst possible moment. Writing the runbook at the same time as the alert is the habit this item is teaching.
Escalation, and what a small team can honestly commit to
Escalation only works if someone has actually agreed to be available, and a small team should promise what it can keep rather than what sounds professional. An honest commitment beats an aspirational one.
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