Your team gets 40 alerts a night and mostly ignores them. How do you fix that?
What they are really testing: Whether you understand that alert fatigue is a reliability risk, not an annoyance. An ignored alert channel means the real incident is missed.
A real interview question
Your team gets 40 alerts a night and mostly ignores them. How do you fix that?
What most people say
drag me
“Raise the thresholds so fewer alerts fire.”
It reduces the number without improving the signal, and it risks silencing the alerts that mattered. The problem is not that thresholds are low, it is that most of these should never have paged a human.
The follow-ups they ask next
How do you alert on an SLO without paging on every blip?
Burn-rate alerting: page when the error budget is being consumed fast enough to exhaust within a short window, with a fast and slow burn pair so brief blips do not fire.
The team is scared to delete alerts. How do you handle that?
Silence rather than delete for 30 days and see whether anything is missed. That converts a scary irreversible decision into a reversible experiment with evidence.
What the interviewer is listening for
- Frames fatigue as a reliability risk
- Deletes never-actioned alerts rather than tuning
- Knows symptom versus cause alerting
What sinks the answer
- Only raises thresholds
- Keeps alerts because deleting feels risky
- No routing by urgency
If you genuinely do not know
Say this instead of freezing. Reasoning out loud from what you do know beats silence every single time, and a good interviewer is listening for exactly that.
“Fatigue is dangerous because [the one real page gets missed]. I [count firings per rule and how many led to action], [delete the never-actioned ones], [replace cause alerts with symptom alerts tied to an SLO], and [route by urgency so only urgent, actionable, user-visible things page].”
Keep going with observability
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