Tuning Alerts Without Burning Out the Team

Start with outcomes

Tie alerts to customer impact, not CPU spikes. If an alert never drives action, downgrade it or remove it.

Tune the noisy culprits

• Batch flappy checks and add sensible cooldowns
• Use SLOs to gate paging: page only on error budget burn
• Route by ownership so the right team sees the right signals

Rehearse and iterate

Run quarterly alert reviews. Track which alerts caused action and which didn't. Shrink the list until only actionable signals remain.