The goal is not a quiet pager. It is a pager nobody has learned to ignore — and once they have, you cannot fix it by adding a more urgent severity.
Muhammed Senussi
Most on-call discussions are about rotation fairness. The bigger lever is the alert set itself.
The only rule that matters
An alert that pages a human must correspond to something a human can do right now. Everything else is a dashboard, a ticket, or a deletion. Applied strictly this removes most of a typical alert catalogue, and the remainder becomes trustworthy — which is the property you actually need at four in the morning.
- Alert on symptoms your users notice, not on causes you happen to have instrumented.
- Every page should have a runbook link. If nobody can write the runbook, the alert is not actionable and should not page.
- Review the previous month of pages in the retrospective and delete something every time.
The goal is not a quiet pager. It is a pager nobody has learned to ignore.
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Lotte Jansen
June 30, 2026A pager nobody has learned to ignore. That is the whole problem stated in one line.
Muhammed Senussi
AuthorJune 30, 2026And once people have learned to ignore it, you cannot fix it by adding a more urgent severity. The trust has to be rebuilt by deleting alerts, which feels backwards to most managers.