What to ask your agency about alerting

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on alerting, these questions are worth asking early.

Cloud work rewards teams who automate early and punishes teams who click through consoles. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

An alert nobody acts on trains everyone to ignore alerts. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Every alert should link to what to do about it. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

How to tell if yours is fine

Operability is a feature, and it has to be built rather than bought. Three things worth confirming about alerting before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Page on symptoms customers feel, not on every anomaly — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.