Understanding Alert Fatigue & How to Prevent it

The average security operations (SecOps) receives 4,484 daily alerts. This flood of notifications can quickly lead to alert fatigue—when desensitization increases the risk of overlooking true security threats. Alert fatigue can be costly for organizations and can lead to missed or ignored alerts, cybersecurity threats and security breaches, employee burnout, and more. 

By understanding alert fatigue, the issues it creates for teams, and ways to prevent it, organizations can adopt strategies to prioritize real threats, improve response times, reduce burnout, and increase employee engagement. 

What is alert fatigue?

Alert fatigue—sometimes called alarm fatigue—happens when a team is inundated by a constant barrage of notifications and alerts from security systems, automated workflows, or monitoring tools. When alerts constantly occur, many of which can be low priority or false positives, it can cause team members to become desensitized. This can lead to delayed responses, missed alerts and in some cases, a complete failure to respond to real threats when team members struggle to differentiate between critical threats and low-priority notifications. 

Signs of alert fatigue

Alert fatigue can cause real issues for organizations. It can sometimes lead to monetary loss or impact team performance or the customer experience. Missed critical alerts can result in system downtime, payment processing errors, or point-of-sale disruptions. These incidents can frustrate customers and damage trust and loyalty.  Teams can reduce these issues by understanding the common signs of alert fatigue.

Here are seven alert fatigue signs to watch out for:

• Delayed response times: When security teams struggle to parse through a large volume of notifications, they can take longer than usual to respond to alerts. 
• Missing alerts: When teams are overwhelmed by constant alerts, they may fail to distinguish critical, high-priority ones from less important issues or false positives.
• Ignoring false positives: When teams receive an excessive number of false-positive alerts, they may begin to unintentionally ignore or mentally tune out notifications.
• Increased stress and burnout: Constant alerts can stress team members and lead to decreased job satisfaction. 
• Decreased productivity: Teams can experience a drop in productivity when they spend so much time managing alerts.
• Reduced threat assessment accuracy: Due to the volume of alerts, teams may make judgment errors or improperly assess potential security risks due to fatigue. 
• Inconsistent incident documentation: When teams are overwhelmed, incident documentation and response records may be incomplete or inconsistent, making it difficult to analyze incidents and improve future responses.

Categorizing alert types

Not every alert requires the same response. Categorizing alerts by threat level and other criteria can help organizations avoid overwhelming responders with non-critical notifications.

Alerts typically fall into the following categories:

• Records: These are preserved in the monitoring system for historical context, serving as reference points rather than requiring immediate action.
• Actionable alerts: These are issues that need a response and should be routed to the appropriate team member. For issues needing attention, determining the urgency helps select the right communication channel.
• Low-urgency alerts: If the issue isn’t urgent, send notifications through non-disruptive channels, such as email or chat, allowing responders to address them as part of their regular workflow.
• High-urgency alerts: Critical issues, such as an outage or SLA breach, demand immediate intervention. Use instant communication channels like phone calls or SMS to notify responders immediately.  

These questions can help to determine the alert type and necessary action:

• Is the issue real? If not, no alert is required.
• Does the issue require attention? If not, log it for future reference.
• Is the issue urgent? If yes, use a high-priority channel for immediate response.

How to reduce alert fatigue

Managing alert fatigue requires a proactive approach. Following best practices and putting the right systems in place can help improve employees’ health and job satisfaction. When teams experience less stress and burnout, they’re better equipped to assess alerts and less likely to miss critical ones. 

Commit to action

Start by examining your alert data—noting how many alerts occur both during on and off-hours and their impact on the team’s workload and well-being.

Commit as a team to improving your alerting workflows. Set aside dedicated time each month or week to address this challenge; even a few hours can make a difference.

Eliminate non-actionable alerts and adjust thresholds

Begin by reviewing your most frequent alerts. For each one, ask: Is this actionable? If not, reclassify it to create a low-priority ticket instead of alerting team members. Alerts that don’t provide specific actions, like raw CPU or memory usage metrics, often add noise rather than value. 

Focus instead on metrics that indicate real issues and adjust alert thresholds as needed to improve their relevance. Using sensitivity and specificity can help ensure that alerts trigger only when there’s a high likelihood of a true problem.

Defer non-urgent alerts

Not all alerts need immediate attention. Create workflows for non-critical issues to prevent off-hours disruptions. Separate non-urgent alerts to handle during regular work hours so your team can rest and recharge for actual emergencies.

Put QA and developers on call 

Adding developers and QA teams to the on-call rotation can improve coverage and reduce resolution times. Additional support can improve visibility into production issues, helping developers resolve application-related issues and prevent future issues.

Use clear, relevant alert names and descriptions

Ensure your alerts provide clear, useful information. Each alert should indicate the severity of the issue and offer next steps for investigation. Include enough context, such as disk usage percentages or actionable links to documentation, so team members can quickly assess and respond to each alert.

Direct alerts to the appropriate teams

Designate teams responsible for specific types of alerts and set up targeted escalation policies. This will prevent unnecessary interruptions and ensure that alerts are routed to those best equipped to handle them.

Use detailed incident analytics

Tracking and measuring alert data and the effectiveness of the alerting system helps teams identify issues and improve processes. Data-driven insights help teams avoid recurring problems.

Regularly review and optimize your alerts

Establish a regular review process, weekly or monthly, to ensure your alerting system is effective and aligned with your team’s needs. Define metrics that are essential to business success and limit other alerts by creating low-priority tickets.

Combine related alerts

When incidents trigger multiple alerts, use alert aggregation tools to group related notifications. This helps reduce the noise and avoid overwhelming your team with duplicate notifications. 

Modern incident management tools like PagerDuty can also help by bundling alerts triggered in close succession into a single, actionable incident. PagerDuty can help to reduce alert fatigue through several key features:

• Alert prioritization and filtering: PagerDuty allows teams to categorize alerts based on severity and relevance. By setting thresholds and tagging alerts (e.g., severity levels 1, 2, 3), non-critical alerts can be suppressed during off-hours, ensuring that only high-severity alerts trigger immediate notifications. 
• Alert consolidation: During alert storms, PagerDuty can bundle multiple related alerts into a single notification, reducing the number of notifications and preventing overwhelm. 
• Event Intelligence: Tools like Event Intelligence reduces alert fatigue by filtering out up to 98% of system noise. This helps teams assess alerts accurately and take appropriate action.

Following these steps and implementing incident management tools helps organizations optimize their alerting processes, ensuring that teams remain responsive to critical issues without being overwhelmed by unnecessary notifications.

Advanced tracking systems and technologies, such as AIOps and incident response automation, help teams filter out noise, reduce alert fatigue, and automate manual processes. Implementing tools to help manage alerts leads to happier, more productive teams and increased customer satisfaction.

Taking steps to reduce alert fatigue is essential to protecting your organization and reducing employee burnout. By learning alert fatigue signs and using effective prevention methods, organizations can create a more manageable and effective alerting environment. 

Ready to streamline your alerts and reduce alert fatigue? Try PagerDuty today and experience how intelligent incident management can help your team stay focused on what matters most.