Alert fatigue
Alert fatigue is what happens when a tool pages so often, and with so little confidence, that people stop listening — and the real incident slips past. The root cause isn't volume. It's precision.
Alert fatigue is the desensitization on-call engineers develop when a monitoring system fires too many alerts of uncertain value — so real incidents get missed among the false and low-confidence pages. Its root cause is a precisionproblem: tools alert with false confidence and can't distinguish a clear failure from a maybe — not simply that they alert too often.
Raising thresholds hides real failures too
The reflex is to treat noise as a volume problem and turn alerts down. But a threshold high enough to silence the noise is also high enough to miss the outage you didn't predict. The fix is precision, not silence.
Group correlated alerts into one incident. Pages that share correlated evidence can collapse into a single incident, so on-call starts with the chain rather than isolated symptoms — see when fifty alerts are one incident.
Grade confidence honestly. Epok commits at measured confidence and abstains, with next steps, when the evidence is thin — so "clearly broken" and "maybe" don't arrive looking identical. How we measure that lives in how we measure detection accuracy.
Attach evidence—or abstain. When a probable cause is supported, committed claims link to the relevant log, span, or metric. When evidence is weak, Epok says so and shows what is missing. See what Epok catches.
Get paged once. With the cause attached.
Keep current paging authoritative. Mirror a representative production boundary for 14 days and compare pages grouped, evidence quality, abstentions, misses, and wrong calls.