Alert Fatigue
Desensitization caused by excessive or low-quality alerts, leading to missed critical alerts.
Desensitization caused by excessive or low-quality alerts, leading to missed critical alerts.
The "Boy Who Cried Wolf"
Alert Fatigue occurs when engineers are exposed to frequent, non-actionable alerts. Over time, they become desensitized and start ignoring all alerts, including the critical ones.
The Psychology
The human brain ignores repetitive stimuli. If your phone beeps 50 times a day for "CPU High" and nothing bad happens, your brain learns that "Beep = Safety". When the "Database Down" beep happens, you ignore it.
Signs of Fatigue
- Engineers ignoring pages until the 3rd notification.
- "Oh, that's just the flaky backup job."
- Sleeping through alerts.
The Cure
Delete your alerts.
Seriously. If an alert is not actionable (i.e., you don't do anything when you see it), delete it.
Only page for User Pain.
ExThe Target Breach
"Hackers infiltrated Target's network. The security system correctly detected the intrusion and fired an alert."
Why Alert Fatigue Matters
Alert fatigue causes real incidents to be missed or ignored, increasing MTTR and customer impact.
According to State of IM 2025, teams with high alert fatigue have 67% longer MTTR.