Session: Alerts Don’t Suck, YOUR Alerts Suck
Nobody “likes” getting alerts. Best case, it tells you something went (or is about to go) wrong. But more often they’re meaningless, trivial, or just plain wrong – a source of constant interruptions, false alarms, unplanned work, and noise.
While some say this is the inherent nature of alerts (and monitoring in general) the truth that well-crafted alerts based on insightful monitoring are a gift – saving hours of investigation and thousands of dollars.
Whether your organization views alerts a curse or a blessing depends on the design and implementation of those alerts, more so than any specific monitoring tool or technique. And, like most things in technology, good design can be taught and learned.
In this talk, I’ll give a brief tour of the alerting hall of horrors, and then provide real-world, vendor-agnostic techniques to make alerts meaningful, effective, valuable, and actionable (as a bonus, I’ll show how to make them manageable, too!). By breaking a few bad habits; understanding how and why vendors put their tools together in particular ways; and learning a few new concepts, you’ll have people emailing you to say “thank goodness I got that alert!”.
Now there’s something you probably don’t hear every day.
