Well the thing is alerts are indeed for actionable events.
For example many remote locations have an on-site battery backup, which would supply power in an event of loosing commercial power. Those are actioned in terms of notifying field teams and deciding whether a specific location needs to be placed on a generator.
Imagine a hurricane disrupted commercial power grid and there are thousands of “site on battery” alerts; somewhere among them there is also an alert for OSPF down between two core switches.
Having a monitor with a large red warning saying “Link X at location Y is down!” - is a pretty effective way to not miss important notifications.
I mean playing devil’s advocate one might say “Then your alerts should have better filtering system with the important ones staying at the top of the page”... which is true. A lot of smart design features can render dashboards less relevant - however when there aren’t enough resources in a DevOps team to implement those solutions, a simple dashboard can go a long way!
There‘s a wide variety of „requires action“. It might be that it‘s fine to act within 1 hour or within 10min. Both deserves an alert, but only one requires you to immediately stop your coffe break...
In an ideal world, I agree. But sometimes an automated system can not perfeclty decide about the severity of an alert which leads to some alerts being ignofed, which is fine.
For example many remote locations have an on-site battery backup, which would supply power in an event of loosing commercial power. Those are actioned in terms of notifying field teams and deciding whether a specific location needs to be placed on a generator.
Imagine a hurricane disrupted commercial power grid and there are thousands of “site on battery” alerts; somewhere among them there is also an alert for OSPF down between two core switches.
Having a monitor with a large red warning saying “Link X at location Y is down!” - is a pretty effective way to not miss important notifications.
I mean playing devil’s advocate one might say “Then your alerts should have better filtering system with the important ones staying at the top of the page”... which is true. A lot of smart design features can render dashboards less relevant - however when there aren’t enough resources in a DevOps team to implement those solutions, a simple dashboard can go a long way!