IT engineers and DevOps teams cannot help but experience alert fatigue when they receive after-hour alerts lacking context or relevance. Messages come in, for example, telling the engineer on-call that disk space is used up. Does this mean 60% used up or 100% used up? Or an after-hours message might come in alerting to a downed server. Which server? Did the back-up server come on-line as a result?
The remedy then is to implement an IT alerting system that differentiates high priority alerts and allows for messaging with attachments. Lack of context can cause significant frustration among engineers as well as alert fatigue.
Companies shouldn’t downplay the impact of alert fatigue. There are also significant financial implications for companies if they have stressed out, unhappy, sleep deprived engineers.
For example, engineers who are feeling the stress of alert fatigue are likely to leave for greener pastures, leaving their employers without their knowledge reservoir and needing to rehire which can cost as much as 30% of the individual’s salary.
Companies that take alert fatigue seriously realize that they need to address the issues of false alarms and sleep deprivation for their engineers on call. Here are some tried and true ways to overcome the significant issue of alert fatigue and take positive steps towards a happy workforce.
IT managers need to set expectation regarding what their engineers can expect from life on-call at their company. By using OnPage, managers can ensure that the experience, while not a cake walk, is a manageable aspect of the job and that alert fatigue will be under control.
Experience OnPage now. See how easy OnPage’s incident management tool is to use. Sign up for a demo and start a new chapter for your on-call engineers.
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