Monitoring & Alerting: Scenario-Based Questions

Alert fatigue occurs when on-call engineers receive too many noisy or irrelevant alerts. This leads to missed critical issues and burnout. Managing alert quality is key to building trust in observability systems.

🔍 Assessment Steps

• Audit current alerts: volume, severity, resolution status, and source (e.g., Prometheus, Datadog, CloudWatch).
• Identify high-frequency, low-impact alerts that are consistently ignored or auto-closed.
• Check for duplicate or overlapping alerts across services or tools.

🧰 Alert Tuning Techniques

• Group by SLO: Align alerts with service-level objectives (availability, latency, error rate).
• Use severity levels: Separate critical (wakeup) vs warning (dashboard-only).
• Deduplication and aggregation: Use alert managers or tools like PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or Prometheus Alertmanager.
• Silencing: Suppress alerts for known issues or during maintenance windows.

✅ Best Practices

• Set actionable thresholds and alert on symptoms, not just conditions (e.g., user-facing impact).
• Implement alert runbooks or links to resolution documentation.
• Review alert metrics weekly and clean up unused ones.
• Test alerts before rollout using simulations or staged traffic.

🚫 Common Pitfalls

• Alerting on every anomaly or threshold breach without context.
• Using static thresholds on dynamic workloads.
• Forwarding all logs/errors to alerts without prioritization.

📌 Real-World Insight

Leading SRE teams operate with alert budgets and rotate alert reviews into sprint ceremonies. The goal is signal, not noise — ensuring that every alert either informs a decision or prompts action.