Alerts Are Fundamentally Messy
Good alerting hygiene consists of a few components: chasing down alert conditions, reflecting on incidents, and thinking of what makes a signal good or bad. The hope is that we can get our alerts to the stage where they will page us when they should, and they won’t when they shouldn’t. However, the reality of alerting in a socio-technical system must cater not only to the mess around the signal, but also to the longer term interpretation of alerts by people and automation acting on them.