Alert

An alert is a notification sent to a predetermined person or group when certain criteria are met. For example, an alert might be triggered by a certain number of unsuccessful login attempts and sent to the on-call engineer at that time.

What is an incident alert? 

When an abnormal event or degradation occurs within a system, a monitoring or incident response tool will send an incident alert to a predetermined party. Monitoring and incident response solutions often alert on events like unexpected changes, environment failures, or risky actions taken by system users.

Why is alerting important for incident management?

When the proper incident alerts are in place, incident responders can quickly identify and resolve issues, minimizing the impact on customers and other stakeholders. The faster the incident is identified and declared, the faster it can be remediated.

Best practices for incident alerts

While incident alerts are essential to a robust incident response process, many teams need help with alert fatigue. If responders get insignificant or false alarms regularly, it becomes much more difficult to pinpoint the real emergencies. Organizations can follow a few best practices to minimize alert fatigue and ensure people get the right alerts.

Set up a process for alerting the right service owners

Once an on-call engineer receives an alert, how do they route this information to those who can fix the problem? Could you consider implementing automation that will deliver the alert to the responsible teams? 

To set up this process automation, you must assign service ownership: establishing which teams are in charge of maintaining and fixing which specific services. Some organizations use a service catalog to track all of this data. 

Integrate your monitoring and incident management platforms 

Integrate your monitoring and incident management platforms to ensure that critical alerts don't slip between the cracks. When all these services can "talk to each other," it's possible to set up automation, like alert routing.

Convert noise to signal

Consider establishing a dedicated project to understand noisy alerts and either remove them entirely, make them actionable, or fix the underlying factors that trigger that alert. It's a good idea to triage alerts by customer impact, only focusing remediation efforts on events that really matter to the business.

Rotate on-call personnel often

Having a single person or small group of people is a vulnerability to your team. Splitting alert triage responsibilities is better than baking them all into the same escalation. Including non-engineers can spread the workload.

Reduce the overall stress of incident management 

Sometimes, an overwhelming amount of alerts will come through your system; it’s an unavoidable fact of operating a complex system. Since some level of alert stress is inevitable, focus on reducing the overall stress of incident management. Before an incident even happens, take the time to develop clear-cut workflows that will get the wheels turning during high-stress situations.