How to Spot the Effects of Alert Fatigue
Imagine being part of an overactive group chat that causes your phone to buzz every few minutes. In the beginning, you open every message but soon realize that most of them aren’t important—or at least are not relevant to you. So, what do you do next?
Maybe you let the messages pile up and check them later. Or perhaps, you mute the group chat and ignore the incoming messages altogether. You can blame this tendency to ignore or avoid incoming messages or notifications on one culprit: alert fatigue.
What is Alert Fatigue?
Alert fatigue is a phenomenon where an overwhelming number of alerts cause someone to become desensitized to them. It can impact anyone, regardless of their workload or employment industry. Alert fatigue is a significant issue in the IT sphere, heavily affecting those working in cybersecurity, incident response, and site reliability engineering (SRE)—fields that receive many notifications.
As a result of the exhaustion it can create, alert fatigue can affect employee morale, reduce issue resolution speed, and impact the software delivery chain in multiple ways. Therefore, it’s crucial to spot alert fatigue for employee wellbeing and mitigate its impact on business operations.
In this post, we explore some potential indicators of alert fatigue and then examine some best practices to reduce it.
Signs of Alert Fatigue
While an alert is one of the best ways to be notified of an emergency, a drastic increase in the number and frequency of alerts almost inevitably leads to alert fatigue. Here are a few indicators that may signal that you—or your colleagues—are experiencing it.
Slow Incident Resolution Times
When you experience a high volume of alerts that turn out to be false positives, it’s easy to become less inclined to take immediate action. This often happens due to oversensitive filtering rules that generate low-fidelity alerts, which rarely signal an emergency. As a result, you might continue with your current tasks and only address the alerts when it’s more convenient.
This pattern makes it harder for you to prioritize and respond to the most critical alerts promptly. You may struggle to distinguish between low-priority and urgent issues, leading to delays in investigating and resolving incidents. Over time, the time it takes to resolve critical incidents could start to increase, as your ability to quickly identify and act on high-priority alerts diminishes.
Ignoring or Delaying Response to Alerts
There are many reasons someone might ignore or miss a critical alert. In addition to excessive false positives that can obscure or distract from important notifications, the absence of clear and actionable information may cause an already fatigued employee to ignore the alert. The employee is already inundated with information and can feel too overwhelmed to discern the steps needed to address a vague or poorly structured alert message. Moreover, alert fatigue can manifest as mental and physical exhaustion, increasing the likelihood of human error responsible for missing the alert altogether.
Frustration About Receiving a New Alert
Whether because of sheer volume, low-quality information, or the plethora of other tasks to complete while remaining on-call, an alert’s sound (or vibration) can immediately cause acute frustration in the alert-fatigued worker.
An alert is a warning signal of a problem. Ideally, it should spring you into a state of readiness to solve it. But if you feel intense anger or agitation, you’re probably experiencing alert fatigue. This can make it nearly impossible to care about your application and put forth the effort necessary to resolve issues.
Reduced Sense of Accomplishment when Handling Alerts
To succeed at work, you need to feel a sense of accomplishment. If you constantly receive alerts, you may feel stressed and lose interest in responding to them. Therefore it’s crucial to set achievable targets, provide adequate support, and find opportunities to celebrate and acknowledge your hard work.
Inefficient Decision-Making
Alert fatigue can impair decision-making abilities, as individuals may struggle to prioritize and respond effectively to alerts amidst the noise. Your top priority should be to cater to any incident affecting customers and impacting business revenue.
Negative Impact on Organizational Metrics
The effects of alert fatigue may be reflected in various organizational metrics, such as increased downtime, missed business objectives, and financial losses.
Causes of Alert Fatigue
Burnout
It’s not humanly possible to be in a constant state of hyperfocus to deal with alerts. So, when you receive a high number of alerts, you burn out sooner, making you unable to do your job well. You may feel overwhelmed with the workload, lose your morale to work, and you could ultimately leave the organization. Unproductivity and high churn rates could indicate alert fatigue.
Complexity of Alerts
Alerts that are overly complex or lack clarity can hinder effective incident response and exacerbate alert fatigue. Poorly configured alert systems that trigger a lot of low-value or false alarms can overwhelm teams.
Lack of Context
Alerts that lack context or relevant information about the underlying issue can impede effective incident triage and response.
Ineffective Communication
Poor communication channels or fragmented alerting processes can contribute to alert fatigue by causing delays in alert dissemination or creating gaps in information flow.
Lack of Training
Insufficient training and documentation on alert management best practices can hinder responders’ ability to effectively handle alerts and mitigate alert fatigue.
The Impact of Alert Fatigue on Incident Response
The impact of alert fatigue on incident response can undermine an organization’s ability to effectively manage and mitigate incidents, resulting in increased operational risk, decreased productivity, and potential reputational damage.
How to Prevent Alert Fatigue
Now that you know how to spot alert fatigue, let’s look at some of the best practices to reduce it.
Optimize Alert Configuration and Tuning
Regularly review and fine-tune the entire cybersecurity system including distributed systems to minimize the frequency of false positive alerts and ensure that only relevant alerts are triggered.
Create Alert Tiers Based on Severity
Not every alert requires the same level of attention and treatment. So, the notification method of every alert should reflect its severity. You can do this by correctly configuring the sensory signals attached to each alert based on its importance.
For instance, an alert indicating a priority-1 (P1) incident should have stronger visual and auditory cues than that for a P3 incident. You can quickly identify and prioritize serious issues by creating alert tiers, even if you’re dealing with many alerts.
Automate Alert Triage and Routing
Utilize tools and systems that can automatically triage and route alerts to the appropriate team members, reducing the manual effort required to manage the high volume of notifications.
Enhance Incident Response Workflows
Alerts that are too vague or lack context will be lost among the sea of incoming notifications, creating unnecessary noise and accelerating the effects of fatigue. The limited information leaves on-call professionals confused and can make a single point of failure in the IT delivery chain.
On the other hand, actionable and insightful alerts help on-call professionals quickly identify and resolve issues. By proactively identifying issues with adaptive incident management, automating notifications, and leveraging historical data, AIOps enables teams to respond quickly, efficiently, and confidently to any incident. It reduces the mean time to detect (MTTD), which benefits the mean time to resolve (MTTR). Actionable alerts also enable organizations to standardize their customer service and improve the overall customer experience.
Leveraging Alert Management Platforms
Whether you’re a DevOps engineer or an SRE, being on-call to ensure an application runs smoothly is a huge responsibility. Effective alerts are crucial to minimizing human errors and maximizing operational efficiency in such a job role. However, you can also feel overwhelmed by the number of alerts you receive. If you dread the next alert you receive or deliberately miss or ignore alerts, there’s a good chance you’re experiencing alert fatigue.
To tackle alert fatigue, organizations need to focus on their people, leverage AIOps, and review the alerting systems in place. xMatters is a service reliability platform that helps automate incident responses to resolve issues quickly. With xMatters, teams can proactively build workflows to address problems, manage on-call seamlessly, get actionable analytics, and cut through the noise with smart monitoring tools. Explore xMatters today to see how it can help with incident management and deliver rich customer experiences.
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