Alert fatigue, alert storm, alert drowning: all these are terms used to indicate when you receive thousands of alerts and either of these situations occur:
- You read every single alert, wasting hours
- You treat most of the alerts as useless, so you miss critical and valid alerts
Both of these situations are unfavorable. But many observability platform providers send out a barrage of alert emails, messages, and tickets.
This leads to alert fatigue. Alert fatigue wastes resources because an entire team looks for multiple outages but in reality, there's only one. If your organization tackles redundant alerts efficiently, valid alerts will not be ignored, and human resources will not be overworked, and this leads to a well-oiled IT infrastructure.
Picturize the impact of alert fatigue with a recent event
In 2013, a multi-billion dollar convenience store chain, suffered a data breach where it spent almost $60 million and battled 90 lawsuits. The malware detection tool they had in place, promptly fired alerts at every step of the way. The engineers didn't pay heed to the alerts when there were too many alerts from the malware detection tool and dismissed them.
Now that you know the impact of alert fatigue, here are the steps you can take to mitigate it:
- Differentiating between expected alerts and alert fluctuations.
- Mapping dependent resources.
- Automated remedial actions
- Assigning proper notification channels.
Expected alerts and fluctuating alerts
There are times when IT administrators know what an alert is without even looking at it just based on the time the alert was received. If a VM is shut down every Friday evening at 6pm, your monitoring platform will alert you every Friday at 6pm about the VM's offline status. You will expect this harmless alert. If you have been receiving this alert for months now, chances are you're going to ignore that VM Offline alert, because you are expecting it. But what if the alert email is warning you about another important VM that needs to be run all seven days of the week?
This is why you should reduce the number of alerts you expect. You should receive an alert only when you must act.
When you are expecting a resource to go offline as expected, schedule maintenance at that time. During maintenance, all the monitors will continue to collect any data that is sent to Site24x7 servers, but alerts are suppressed. After the maintenance window, monitoring continues as usual.
Fluctuating alerts are those that keep flickering between statuses. For example, consider a log file that will be archived once it reaches the threshold of 1GB. Once the log file reaches 1GB, the file monitor will send a down alert. The next minute, when the log file is moved to the archives, the monitor sends an up alert. Every time this situation occurs, the monitor goes from Up to Down to back Up. This is one more major contributor to alert fatigue.
Now that we know the pitfalls, let us see how we can fix them. Fluctuating alerts are the products of momentary spikes. If your organization is prone to momentary spikes, your solution is a poll strategy. In the threshold and availability profile, you can choose to get alerts only if an alert is sustained.
Mapping dependent resources
IT infrastructure is interdependent, and events are related. From the printer at reception to the production database, every aspect is dependent on the rest of the infrastructure. For instance, consider a hypervisor running two VMs. One VM has two processes being monitored and the other VM has an IIS monitor and a database monitor configured. If the hypervisor experiences an outage, you will receive seven alerts in total.
Possible alerts:
- XYZ hypervisor is offline.
- VM1 is offline.
- VM2 is offline.
- WMIPrvSe.exe is down.
- LitDefender.exe is down.
- Microsoft IIS application is down.
- Microsoft SQL database is down.
Seven tickets or alerts will be created instead of just one.
An alert should point to the root cause, and all other alerts from dependent resources are redundant and red herrings. Customize dependency configuration in Site24x7 to suppress redundant alerts. Learn how Site24x7 helps you combat alert fatigue with dependency configuration. With our monitoring engine that contextually relates alerts that are interdependent, you receive only the alerts you need to act on.
Automated remedial actions
At the first sign of a problem, your tech-stack should have auto-remediation actions in place to prevent problems snowballing into an outage. For example, consider a disk that reaches its capacity due to a log file that gets too large too often. Traditional monitoring tools will only alert you when the disk reaches capacity. But with sophisticated monitoring tools like Site24x7, you can let IT automation run a script every time the disk reaches capacity and move the log file to a backup.
Did automation fix your problem? Yes, and more importantly, without firing an alert and dragging you into an activity that does not necessarily require your intervention.
Uncleared memory, temporary files filling up disks, crashed applications, unresponsive servers: these are a few examples where auto-remedial actions can help you prevent multiple alerts flooding your mailboxes and ticketing tool.
To get detailed insights about how automation is important for your IT infrastructure, you can learn from our dedicated automation for servers guide.
Proper notification channels
How do most monitoring platforms run? By sending alerts to the email associated with the account.
This flow looks simple, but there are problems. The system administrator working the shift should be getting the alerts. We don't need to alert the ones off the clock. In organizations where there are dedicated database administrators and administrators for each category of servers, an outage in a server or VM should alert the person responsible for it. If the responsible individual hasn't acted on the alert, the alert should be escalated.
If your organization has a ticketing tool, alerts should create tickets. Let's see how Site24x7 handles alerts:
With notification profiles to configure alerts, on-call schedules to let Site24x7 know the directly responsible individuals (DRIs) based on the time, and user alert groups to group the users based on their responsibilities, you can ensure the alert reaches the right person in the right way.
Alert fatigue mitigation with Site24x7
Alert fatigue delays your incident response, impacts the time to detect (TTD), and increases the risk of missing critical alerts. By promptly configuring your monitors and account, Site24x7 helps you receive only the alerts that matter. Improve the resilience of your IT infrastructure, eliminate unwanted outages, and achieve skyrocketed operational efficiency with Site24x7.
Haven't tried Site24x7 yet?
To make the decision-making easier, we offer fully functional trials to your entire organization. Install our agent on your Windows and Linux servers in just a few clicks. If you would like a tailor-made demo specific to your business needs, our product experts would be more than happy to give you one. Happy monitoring!