Reducing alert noise involves drawing a line between incidents that need an immediate response and ones that do not. Get this distinction wrong and your team is either interrupted unnecessarily or misses something critical.
In this guide, we’ll help you make that distinction clear. We’ll cover what counts as noise and how to reduce it without missing what matters.
Table of contents
What counts as noise (and what doesn’t)
Consider asking yourself the question: Which incident would you actually want to be woken up for at 3 AM?
Anything that clears it deserves an immediate response. Anything below it can probably wait or be handled with a softer alert channel (like Slack or email). And anything well below it might not need to reach you at all.
The 3 AM question works because it cuts past abstract definitions. It forces a concrete answer about what genuinely matters. A payment service going down would clear it without much debate. A credit card decline probably wouldn’t. The line is rarely controversial once you ask this question.
Reducing alert noise
Reducing alert noise has two sides to it: handling the incidents that don’t need attention and keeping the ones that do still loud and clear.
Handling the noise
One way to handle noise is through alert routing rules. They help you decide how each type of incident reaches you and when.
So instead of every incident reaching you the same way, you get to set different behaviours for different situations. A low-priority incident at 3 AM doesn’t need to wake anyone up. It can wait until morning, get auto-acknowledged, or resolve on its own. Alert routing rules help you set that behaviour once so it happens automatically every time that incident triggers.
Here are some automatic actions of alert routing rules worth knowing:
- Auto-acknowledge for incidents you want to track but don’t need to act on immediately
- Auto-resolve for incidents that always self-correct
- Resolve by timer for ones that probably don’t need attention but might if they persist
- Ignore incidents you never need to see
The right action depends on how much visibility you want to keep. There’s a separate guide on setting up routing rules in detail if you want to go deeper. Read it here →
Revisiting your monitoring system is the other lever worth pulling. Thresholds set in the early days often stay untouched as systems grow. A server triggering an incident at 60% memory capacity might make sense initially. A few months later, when the service handles twice the traffic, that same threshold becomes a source of noise. Adjusting it to reflect how your system actually behaves today is usually where the biggest drop in noise comes from.
Keeping critical incidents loud
The other side of noise reduction is protecting the incidents that genuinely need attention. Specifically, making sure they still land with the urgency they deserve. A phone call carries weight in a way a Slack message simply doesn’t. If phone calls go out for every incident regardless of priority, that weight gradually disappears. Your team starts treating them like any other notification and that’s when real incidents start getting missed.
A few small setup choices help keep that signal strong:
- Phone calls reserved for critical incidents only
- A distinct ringtone for your alerting tool so the call stands out
- Push notifications kept on as a backup if a call is missed
With Spike, you can set a different sound specifically for critical incidents. That way your phone tells you how urgent something is before you even look at the screen.
These small details make it easier for the right incident to stand out when it matters.
Alert noise is one of those things that’s easy to let slide. A few extra alerts a week feel manageable until they don’t. The good news is that once you know which incidents genuinely need your attention, the fixes are usually straightforward. A few routing rules, a threshold or two, and some discipline around your channels go a long way. The goal is simple: when your phone rings at 3 AM, it should mean something.
If you’re ready to start reducing alert noise, Spike’s alert routing rules are a good place to begin. You can set up automatic actions for different types of incidents and keep your critical ones loud and clear.
FAQs
How do I know if my current alerting setup has too much noise?
A few patterns usually point to it. Your on-call engineer is getting paged frequently but rarely needs to act on what comes through. Incidents sit unacknowledged for longer than usual. Or your team has started treating phone calls the same way they treat Slack notifications. If any of these feel familiar, your setup probably has more noise than it should.
How do I handle alert noise from third-party integrations I don’t control?
The payload is usually your best lever here. Even if you can’t control what the third-party tool sends, you can set up routing rules that act on the content of what arrives. If a particular integration consistently sends low-priority signals, a routing rule can auto-acknowledge or suppress those automatically without you having to touch the integration itself. Learn more about payload-based routing here →
Can alert noise affect SLA compliance?
It can. When too much noise reaches your on-call engineer, real incidents take longer to acknowledge and resolve. That delay can push response times beyond what your SLAs allow. Reducing noise usually has a direct effect on response times because your team spends less time sorting through what matters and more time acting on it.
Should low-priority incidents ever trigger a phone call?
Probably not. The whole point of keeping phone calls reserved for critical incidents is that the channel itself carries meaning. A low-priority incident triggering a phone call dilutes that signal for the next critical one. A Slack message or email is usually a better fit.