Monitoring and Alerting Strategies That Reduce Alert Fatigue

When every alert fires, no alert matters. Teams drown in notifications, start ignoring pages, and miss the one alert that signals a real outage. The fix is not more alerts—it is fewer, better-targeted alerts tied to what users actually experience.

Most monitoring starts with cause-based alerts: CPU above 80%, disk above 90%, memory above 85%. These fire constantly and rarely correspond to user-facing problems. Symptom-based alerts detect what users experience: elevated error rates, slow response times, failed transactions.