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Are Your IT Alerts Crying Wolf? The Problem with Alert Severity in Observability and Monitoring
High packet loss, WAN circuit down, and immediate action required.
Alerts every IT professional dreads seeing, but do we as professionals truly understand the context and severity behind these issues?
The way we monitor assets across our networks, servers, and applications often leads to a critical disconnect between alert severity and the actual impact of an issue. Let’s illustrate this through a couple of scenarios that we’re all familiar with:
Scenario #1: The False Alarm
Imagine a web tier with 5 independent servers, each handling a portion of your system’s workload. Suddenly, a critical-high alert screams that a server is down, painting a picture of impending doom. Your team scrambles, only to discover that servers 2 through 5 have seamlessly rebalanced the workload, and the impact is minimal. Meanwhile, you’re fielding questions about Bluetooth pairing issues…
Scenario #2: The Silent Killer
Now, consider a third-party application vital to your SAP environment. This application goes down, triggering the same critical-high alert as in Scenario #1. However, this time there’s no backup, and your team, still reeling from the previous false alarm, puts this issue on the backburner.
The result? Catastrophic failure. Every SAP request relies on this app, and everything grinds to a halt. Alerts are flying, but you’re paralyzed. You lack the context to recognize that this seemingly minor application failure is the root cause of the widespread outage.
The Real Issue: A Lack of Context
The problem is clear: we’re treating minor hiccups with the same urgency as major incidents. This leads to misallocation of resources, delayed responses to critical issues, and a constant state of alert fatigue for IT professionals.
Your team is drowning in a sea of alerts, unable to distinguish between minor issues and true emergencies. They lack the information needed to understand the scope and impact of a problem, let alone how to prevent it in the future.
To see how to add this missing context, our relationship mapping in cloud security article shows how dependencies turn noisy alerts into decisions.
