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Alert fatigue is a routing problem

Most noisy alerts are real signals sent to the wrong person at the wrong time. Fix the routing before you mute anything.

K

Kareem Arafa

August 11, 2026 · 1 min read

When a team says it gets too many alerts, the instinct is to delete monitors or raise thresholds. Usually the alerts are accurate; they are just landing in front of people who cannot act on them.

Route by owner and urgency

Send each alert to the team that owns the service, and decide per priority how loud it should be. A failed nightly report can wait in a channel until morning; a checkout outage should page someone now.

Review what woke people up

Once a month, look at every alert that paged someone outside working hours. For each one ask: did it need a human, and was it the right human? Change the routing rules, not the monitors, when the answer is no.

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Kareem Arafa

Founder, Ionhour

Kareem builds Ionhour and writes about the unglamorous work of keeping scheduled jobs, APIs and websites running.

Know the moment a job doesn’t run.

Cron jobs, websites, and APIs — watched 24/7, with alerts in Slack, SMS, or email.