Too Many Alerts, No Action: Why Fewer Alarms Make Better Monitoring

A software engineer reflects on how his team once built a monitoring system with hundreds of alerts, only to find that alert fatigue caused critical notifications to be ignored. When a real outage occurred, its alert was lost in the noise, exposing a fundamental flaw in their approach. The engineer now applies strict criteria before creating any alert, asking whether it genuinely requires someone to act immediately. He also advocates alerting on user-facing symptoms like latency and error rates rather than internal metrics like CPU usage. Regular audits of existing alerts — removing any that have never prompted a meaningful response — are central to his philosophy that good monitoring is measured by the relevance of each alert, not the total count.