What is Alert fatigue?

Alert fatigue is the state where people receive so many alerts, or so many that need no action, that they stop reacting to them, including the ones that matter. It is a design problem, not a discipline problem. It is produced by thresholds set too tight, alerts with no action attached, duplicates, and no severity separation.

A practical audit sorts last month’s alerts into actioned, acknowledged-and-ignored, and never seen. Delete or downgrade everything in the last two buckets. Defences include deduplication, grouping, severity-based routing, quiet hours for non-critical alerts, and a failure threshold before paging.