Separate alerts that should page from noise
Sorts an alert list into what wakes a person and what belongs on a dashboard.
| Category | Development › Deploy & operations |
|---|---|
| Tags | ReviewingChecklistDeveloper |
Audit these alerts. For each, answer one question first: **what does a human do, right now, when this fires?** - There is an immediate action → page - Action needed but not urgent → ticket - No action, only information → dashboard, not an alert - *Fires regularly and is routinely ignored → delete it.* An ignored alert trains people to ignore the next one. Then classify each and give: - Threshold and duration. Most noisy alerts fire on an instantaneous value that should have a sustained window. - Whether it alerts on a **symptom users feel** or on a cause. Symptom alerts catch problems you did not predict; cause alerts mostly fire without user impact. - What it would miss — the failure mode it does not cover. Then: 1. Alerts to delete, with why. Be specific; this is the highest-value output. 2. **Missing alerts** — from the recent incidents I gave you, which ones nothing would have caught. That gap matters more than any tuning. 3. Alerts that fire together, which should be one alert. 4. The night-time page list, kept as short as it can be. Rules: - *Deleting alerts is the main work here.* Do not hedge by keeping everything at a lower severity. - An alert with no runbook is an alert nobody can act on. Note which lack one.
After pasting, fill in the fields at the bottom (Current alerts · On-call setup · Recent incidents)
What this prompt does
Too many alerts means all of them get ignored, including the real one. The test here is "what does a human do right now when this fires" — if there is no action, it is not an alert.