Most teams have plenty of dashboards and not enough actionable alerts. The gap between “we have observability” and “we can reliably detect and diagnose incidents” usually comes down to signal design, not tooling.
Metrics, logs, traces — and the fourth thing nobody talks about
The classic three pillars matter, but SLOs (service level objectives) tied to user-facing outcomes are what actually connect observability data to business impact — without them, teams alert on infrastructure symptoms instead of what customers actually experience.
Alert fatigue is a design problem, not a tuning problem
If your team is muting alerts or has a channel nobody reads anymore, the fix usually isn’t better thresholds — it’s fewer, better-designed alerts tied to SLO burn rate rather than raw metric thresholds.
Multi-window, multi-burn-rate alerting (borrowed from Google’s SRE workbook) catches both fast, severe outages and slow error-budget erosion without paging on every transient blip.
Getting started without a platform rewrite
You don’t need to replace your existing stack to adopt SLO-based alerting — most observability platforms (Prometheus/Grafana, Datadog, Dynatrace) support burn-rate alerting today; the work is defining the right SLOs, not buying new tooling.
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