21 March 2026
Alerts That Earn Attention
How to keep real-time paging rare enough that people still open the message.
Alert fatigue is a product problem disguised as an ops problem. If every minor dip pages someone, the channel dies—and the one critical failure arrives unread.
Design alerts around decisions: roll back, pause a campaign, open a war room. If the alert cannot name the decision, it is probably a dashboard annotation instead.
Review mute and quiet-hours rules after every noisy week. The best real-time systems are quiet most of the time.