Alerting

An alert that fires at 3 AM and turns out to be a false positive wastes an engineer's sleep—and erodes trust in alerting. Alert fatigue is real: if you cry wolf too often, people stop responding. Effective alerting is hard: you need to know what to alert on (not everything), when to alert (not on temporary blips), and how to alert (actionable information, not noise).

This section covers:

• SLO-Based Alerting: Alert when you breach service-level objectives, not arbitrary thresholds
• Runbooks and On-Call: Structure incident response with runbooks and clear ownership
• Incident Response: Manage the lifecycle from detection to postmortem

📄️ SLO-Based Alerts vs Static Thresholds

Alert on service-level objectives, not arbitrary thresholds. Align alerts with actual user impact.

📄️ Runbooks and On-Call

Guide incident response with runbooks; structure on-call rotations for coverage and sustainability.

📄️ Incident Response Lifecycle and Postmortems

Manage incidents from detection to resolution to learning. Blameless postmortems prevent recurrence.