Common bad-alert patterns to avoid.

medium

Answer

$(1) Alert on threshold that fires daily (noise).$
$(2) Alert without runbook (no action).$
$(3) Alert on symptoms, not causes ('page fires slower' rather than 'db p99 up').$
$(4) Alerting on averages (hides tails).$
$(5) Static thresholds ignoring seasonality.$
$(6) No de-duplication (spam).$
$(7) Waking humans for auto-recoverable.$
$(8) Missing correlation (10 alerts for one root cause).$
$(9) Alert on things with no fix.$
$Rule: every alert = 'someone must do something now'.$

Check yourself — multiple choice

More alerts
Daily fires (noise) / no runbook / symptom vs cause / averages / static thresholds / no dedup / no auto-recover / no correlation / no fix; every alert = must act now
Random
Not real

Bad alerts: noise / no runbook / symptom / average / static / no dedup / duplicates.

#monitoring#observability

215 interview questions in this topic.