Alert Fatigue

Alert fatigue is the term for when IT teams receive an overwhelming number of alerts, leading them to become desensitized and miss or ignore critical alarms. Alert fatigue occurs when there are too many alerts triggered, many of which are false positives or redundant. This overwhelms and frustrates IT staff, causing them to ignore or disable alerts altogether.

Alert fatigue typically happens when monitoring systems are not properly tuned. For example, a system might be configured to send alerts for every minor issue. Getting hundreds of notifications about low-level problems diminishes the importance of critical alerts in the noise. Effective ways to combat alert fatigue include reducing redundant alerts, tuning thresholds to filter out false positives, grouping related alerts, and implementing on-call rotations so individuals do not get burned out handling alerts. The goal is to ensure the monitoring system only sends actionable and relevant alerts to the right teams. This enables staff to respond appropriately without getting overloaded and developing fatigue.