The on-call engineer received 400+ alerts per week. When a real incident started — a slow memory leak that would eventually OOM-kill the primary database — the alert was buried in noise. The outage lasted 4 hours. The alert had fired 90 minutes earlier.
The monitoring system worked. It detected the problem with 90 minutes of lead time — more than enough to prevent the outage. But the alerting system had trained the on-call team to ignore it. The failure wasn't detection. It was attention.
You're the engineering manager responsible for platform reliability. After a 4-hour database outage, the post-mortem reveals: the alert fired 90 minutes before the OOM. The on-call engineer had 47 unread alerts at the time. Average weekly alert volume is 400+. Leadership wants a plan to make sure this doesn't happen again. What do you propose?
No hints. Just judgment.
Better alerting platforms can group and deduplicate alerts, which reduces the volume the on-call engineer sees. But if the underlying alerts aren't actionable, you've organized the noise without improving the signal. Grouped non-actionable alerts are still non-actionable. The investment in tooling feels productive but doesn't change the fundamental ratio of signal to noise.