What Is Alert Fatigue and Why It's Killing Your On-Call Team
If you’ve ever been on-call, you know the feeling. Your phone buzzes at 2 AM. You jolt awake, heart racing, only to find it’s another non-critical warning that could’ve waited until morning. After a few weeks of this, something changes. You stop reacting with urgency. You start ignoring alerts, or worse — you sleep right through them.
That’s alert fatigue, and it’s one of the most dangerous problems facing DevOps and SRE teams today.
What Is Alert Fatigue?
Alert fatigue occurs when on-call engineers are exposed to such a high volume of alerts that they become desensitized. Critical notifications get buried in a flood of noise, response times slow down, and real incidents go unnoticed until users start complaining.
It’s not a willpower problem. It’s a systems problem.
The Numbers Tell a Brutal Story
Research consistently shows that the average on-call engineer receives hundreds of alerts per week. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the majority of those alerts require no action.
Studies in healthcare (where alert fatigue was first documented) found that when more than 90% of alerts are false positives, clinicians override or ignore up to 96% of all alerts. The same psychology applies to engineering teams.
When everything is urgent, nothing is.
Warning Signs Your Team Has Alert Fatigue
Not sure if your team is affected? Look for these patterns:
1. Increasing acknowledgment times. If it’s taking longer and longer for on-call engineers to respond to pages, fatigue is setting in. What used to get a 2-minute response now takes 15.
2. Alerts getting muted or silenced. Engineers start creating personal filters, muting channels, or turning off notifications for “noisy” services. This is a rational response to an irrational volume of alerts.
3. Incidents discovered by users first. If your customers are reporting outages before your monitoring catches them (or before your team reacts), your alert pipeline is broken.
4. On-call burnout and attrition. Engineers start dreading on-call rotations. They negotiate swaps, call in sick, or quietly start interviewing elsewhere. The on-call tax becomes too high.
5. “I thought someone else was handling it.” In teams with shared alert channels, diffusion of responsibility kicks in. Everyone assumes someone else is looking at it.
What Causes Alert Fatigue?
Alert fatigue rarely has a single cause. It’s usually a combination of:
Too Many Low-Priority Alerts
The most common culprit. Teams set up monitoring for everything — CPU spikes, memory warnings, disk usage thresholds — and route all of it to the on-call phone. A 5% increase in latency at 3 AM shouldn’t wake anyone up.
Fix: Ruthlessly classify alerts into tiers. Only P1 (service-impacting) alerts should page someone. P2 and below go to a dashboard or async channel.
Poor Alert Routing
When every alert goes to the same channel or the same person, signal gets lost in noise. A database alert and a marketing site warning shouldn’t have the same escalation path.
Fix: Route alerts based on service ownership. The team that owns the service should get the page — not everyone.
Missing Context in Alerts
An alert that says “CPU > 90% on host-prod-17” is almost useless at 3 AM. What service runs there? Is it expected (batch job)? What should I do first?
Fix: Enrich alerts with context: affected service, runbook link, recent changes, and impact scope.
No Deduplication or Grouping
A single database failover can trigger 50 downstream alerts in 30 seconds. If each one pages separately, your engineer gets 50 notifications for one incident.
Fix: Group related alerts and deduplicate. One page per incident, not one page per symptom.
Alerts That Never Get Tuned
Many teams treat alerting as set-and-forget. Thresholds set during initial deployment never get updated, even as traffic patterns, infrastructure, and baselines change.
Fix: Schedule quarterly alert reviews. For every alert that fired in the past 90 days, ask: “Did this require human action?” If not, tune or remove it.
A Practical Framework for Fixing Alert Fatigue
Here’s a step-by-step approach any team can follow:
Step 1: Audit Your Current Alerts
Pull a report of every alert that fired in the last 30 days. Categorize each one:
- Actionable: Required immediate human intervention
- Informational: Useful to know, but no action needed
- Noise: Should never have alerted
If more than 30% of your alerts are noise, you have work to do.
Step 2: Define Your Alert Tiers
Create clear definitions:
- P1 (Page immediately): Service is down or degraded for users. Revenue impact. Data loss risk.
- P2 (Notify during business hours): Service is degraded but not user-facing. Needs attention today.
- P3 (Dashboard only): Informational. Review during next business day.
Step 3: Fix Your Routing
Map every alerting rule to a specific team and escalation path. Use multi-channel delivery: Slack for P2-P3, phone/SMS for P1. Don’t wake people up for things that can wait.
Step 4: Add Runbooks
Every P1 alert should link to a runbook. Even a simple one: “Check X dashboard → If Y, restart Z → If that doesn’t work, escalate to [person].” This reduces mean time to resolution and takes cognitive load off a half-asleep engineer.
Step 5: Review and Iterate
Set a monthly or quarterly cadence to review alert performance. Track:
- Total alert volume (trending up or down?)
- Percentage of actionable alerts
- Mean time to acknowledge
- On-call satisfaction (yes, ask your team)
The Human Cost
Alert fatigue isn’t just an operational problem — it’s a people problem. Chronic sleep disruption from unnecessary pages leads to burnout, decreased job satisfaction, and higher turnover. The engineers you lose to alert fatigue are usually your best ones, because they care enough to respond every time until they can’t anymore.
Investing in alert quality isn’t just about better incident response. It’s about retaining your team.
Start Today
You don’t need to overhaul your entire monitoring stack overnight. Start with one thing: pull your alert report from the last 30 days and find the noisiest offender. Tune it, mute it, or delete it.
Then do it again next week.
Small, consistent improvements in alert quality compound over time. Your on-call team — and your customers — will thank you.
PagerBolt helps teams route alerts to the right people through the right channels. Join the waitlist to learn more.