The hottest Alerting Substack posts right now

Avenue is a platform for operationally complex companies, bringing data and operations stack to life
Operations teams at tech companies have an array of internal tools vital for company operations
Avenue provides a system for operational alerts, tracking, and issue resolution, akin to engineering team tools

Use Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) to recover from failures and get notified in fault tolerant systems.
Set up DLQ with two queues - Original for processing messages and DLQ to capture failed messages for retries.
Implement monitoring for DLQ growth to alert on-call engineers and prevent issues from affecting customers.

Facing unexpected incidents and downtime is a common challenge in tech operations.
Proactively solving issues during stressful on-call duties can lead to innovative solutions.
Implementing customized alerting systems can greatly improve incident response and team efficiency.

Ensure your on-call rotation is sufficiently staffed to prevent burnout and ensure a timely response to incidents.
Avoid delegating on-call responsibilities to another team to maintain a tight feedback loop and incentivize problem-solving.
Have everyone on the team participate in the on-call rotation to promote empathy, reliability, and a collective care for system stability.

Alerting in incident management notifies the team to respond to production problems promptly based on severity levels.
When setting up alerting mechanisms, consider categorizing alerts into pages for emergencies, tickets for best effort during business hours, and logs that require no response.
Craft actionable alerts by enriching them with context like graphs, log entries, and links to runbooks. Test new alerts thoroughly before directing them to the on-call team.

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Observability tools provide metrics, dashboards, and notifications without software licensing fees.
Some observability tools focus on cloud-native infrastructure, making setup challenging for non-cloud businesses.
O11y-in-a-box simplifies monitoring by providing Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana for performance, availability, log analysis, and alerting on a single-host system.