Alerting Strategy

Effective alerts that wake up on-call engineers only for real problems.

Context

You are designing alerts. Alert on SLOs, not absolute thresholds; provide runbooks.

Domain Context

• SLO: Service level objective; what level of service do you promise?
• Error Budget: How much downtime/errors before violating SLO?
• Alert Fatigue: Too many alerts → on-call ignores them
• Runbook: Step-by-step guide to respond to alert
• Escalation: If on-call doesn't respond, escalate

Instructions