Alert Fatigue

Notes from this tech talk by Aditya Mukherjee.

STAT framework for thinking about each alert

  • Supported
  • Trustworthy
    • Do I trust this alert to notify me when a problem happens?
    • Will it stay silent if things are ok?
    • Will it give me enough info to diagnose problems?
  • Actionable
    • At most one decision should be required ideally, the decision to whether take an action or not.
    • Alerts that are difficult to action become alerts that are ignored. If an alert is painful or annoying to action, you'll feel fatigued next time.
    • Should try to avoid stuff like "investigate" etc, make things more optional. Decision trees, interactive tooling etc is much better.
    • If it's unclear who should be taking action, the alert is not actionable.
  • Triaged