Observability That Reduces Pager Fatigue

Intro: Why Too Many Alerts = Bad SRE Culture

If everything is critical, nothing is. An endless flood of alerts leads to pager fatigue — where engineers become numb, incidents are missed, and system reliability suffers.

Good observability isn't about collecting more data or generating more alerts; it's about reducing noise and surfacing only actionable insights.

This guide walks you through observability strategies to improve reliability without burning out your team.

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The Four Golden Signals

The foundation of observability comes from Google’s SRE book: Latency, Traffic, Errors, Saturation.

Examples by System Type

For a Web App:

• Latency → Page load time
• Traffic → Active sessions
• Errors → 5xx rates
• Saturation → Frontend CDN or cache hit ratio

For an API Service:

• Latency → P99 request time
• Traffic → Requests/sec
• Errors → HTTP 4xx/5xx ratio
• Saturation → Container CPU throttling

For a Database:

• Latency → Query execution time
• Traffic → Connections/sec
• Errors → Deadlocks or failed writes
• Saturation → Connection pool usage

RED vs USE Monitoring Methods

RED Method → For Services

Focuses on Requests, Errors, and Duration:

• Track how many requests you serve
• Monitor error rates at the API/service level
• Measure request duration (P95, P99 latency)

Example (API Service):

USE Method → For Infrastructure

Focuses on Utilization, Saturation, and Errors:

• Utilization → % of resources in use
• Saturation → Pending work/backlogs
• Errors → Hardware/network failures

Example (Node-Level Metrics):

Together, RED covers service health, and USE covers infrastructure health. Use them together for complete observability.

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Alerting Best Practices

A great monitoring setup still fails if alerts overwhelm your team. Focus on fewer, better, actionable alerts.

1. Multi-Window Burn Rate Alerts

Instead of firing alerts on single thresholds, monitor burn rates across short + long windows:

This avoids noisy pages for short spikes while catching sustained issues.

2. Suppression & Grouping in PagerDuty

• Group related alerts into one incident
• Use maintenance windows to suppress noise during deploys
• Route non-critical alerts to email/slack instead of paging

3. Alert on Symptoms, Not Causes

• Alert when users are impacted, not on every CPU spike
• Example: Alert on 500 errors rather than raw CPU usage

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Dashboards for Different Personas

One dashboard won’t serve everyone. Tailor observability views based on audience:

Best Practice

• Keep exec dashboards simple → Only show KPIs tied to revenue/impact
• Keep dev dashboards deep → Logs, traces, and low-level service metrics
• For SRE dashboards, combine RED + USE for a full picture

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Key Takeaways

Good observability reduces noise and lets your team focus on what matters:

• Use the Four Golden Signals to define SLIs
• Combine RED + USE methods for full coverage
• Set multi-window burn rate alerts to catch real issues early
• Use alert grouping/suppression to avoid paging fatigue
• Tailor dashboards for devs, SREs, and business stakeholders

Observability isn’t about monitoring everything — it’s about monitoring the right things so your team can stay reliable and sane.