Glossary · Incidents and alerting
Alert fatigue is what happens when people receive so many alerts, many of them false or unimportant, that they start to ignore, mute or delay them, including the ones that matter.
Every alert that turns out to need nothing teaches the reader that alerts can wait. Over time responses slow down, channels get muted and real incidents are found late. The term comes from healthcare, where staff exposed to constant alarms stop reacting to them.
The causes are familiar: alerts on a single failed check, thresholds set too tight, many alerts for one cause, alerts that need no action, and everything going to everyone. Each false positive adds to it.
The fixes: confirm before alerting, alert on what users feel rather than on every metric, route by urgency, silence planned work, and review alerts regularly, removing or downgrading any alert nobody acted on.
Uptimecheck confirms every failure with a second check before alerting, sends slow alerts only after three slow checks in a row, and alerts on a DNS change only once two checks have seen it. Channels can wait 5 to 60 minutes, so a short blip reaches chat but not a phone; maintenance windows silence planned work, and when a site recovers before its outage alert went out, only the recovery is sent.
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Guides 7 min read
False alerts teach teams to ignore monitoring. How to cut the noise: confirm every failure with a second check, set sensible timeouts, validate the right URL and route alerts to the people who can act.
ReadMonitoring 7 min read
Good server alert thresholds catch a filling disk or a memory leak early without paging anyone for a harmless spike. Starting values for CPU, load, RAM, swap, disk, network and reboots.
ReadCount alerts per on-call shift and the share that led to action. If most pages need nothing done, or people get several a night, the alerting needs work.
No. Page only for what needs a person now; send the rest to a chat channel or email that is read during the day.
Not if failures are confirmed before alerting. Frequent checks find outages sooner; confirmation keeps single blips out of your inbox.
Set up your first monitor in under a minute, or look around the live demo first.
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