What is Alerting Strategy?

Success metrics include system uptime, model performance stability, deployment velocity, and operational cost efficiency.

Limit actionable alerts to 5-10 per on-call shift. Group related alerts by root cause rather than symptom. Set alert thresholds based on business impact rather than technical metrics. Implement alert deduplication and suppression for known issues. Use multi-window alerting that requires sustained violations rather than momentary spikes. Review and prune alert rules quarterly, removing any alert that hasn't required action in 3 months. Every alert should have a clear runbook and expected resolution action.

Page on-call for service availability drops below SLO, sustained error rates above 2x baseline, and complete pipeline failures. Send notifications for performance degradation trends, approaching capacity limits, and data quality warnings. Never page for informational metrics or events that don't require immediate action. The test for paging: would you wake someone at 3am for this? If not, it's a notification. Over-paging degrades incident response quality because engineers start ignoring alerts.

Establish baselines from 4 weeks of stable production data. Set warning thresholds at 1.5 standard deviations from baseline and critical thresholds at 3 standard deviations. Use percentage-based thresholds for metrics with seasonal variation. Require sustained violations over 5-15 minute windows rather than instantaneous triggers. Start with wider thresholds and tighten based on observed false positive rates. Target less than 5% false positive rate to maintain team trust in the alerting system.

Limit actionable alerts to 5-10 per on-call shift. Group related alerts by root cause rather than symptom. Set alert thresholds based on business impact rather than technical metrics. Implement alert deduplication and suppression for known issues. Use multi-window alerting that requires sustained violations rather than momentary spikes. Review and prune alert rules quarterly, removing any alert that hasn't required action in 3 months. Every alert should have a clear runbook and expected resolution action.

Page on-call for service availability drops below SLO, sustained error rates above 2x baseline, and complete pipeline failures. Send notifications for performance degradation trends, approaching capacity limits, and data quality warnings. Never page for informational metrics or events that don't require immediate action. The test for paging: would you wake someone at 3am for this? If not, it's a notification. Over-paging degrades incident response quality because engineers start ignoring alerts.

Establish baselines from 4 weeks of stable production data. Set warning thresholds at 1.5 standard deviations from baseline and critical thresholds at 3 standard deviations. Use percentage-based thresholds for metrics with seasonal variation. Require sustained violations over 5-15 minute windows rather than instantaneous triggers. Start with wider thresholds and tighten based on observed false positive rates. Target less than 5% false positive rate to maintain team trust in the alerting system.