Comparison
Alert fatiguevsToil
Alert fatigue
the channel has forty alerts a day, everyone has muted it, and the real one goes unnoticed for two hours.
The desensitisation caused by frequent, low-value or non-actionable alerts. It is a reliability failure in itself: the detection system exists and no longer works. The cure is deleting alerts, not adding severity levels — if an alert does not need a human to do something now, it is a dashboard.
Full entry →Toil
you did the same twenty-minute manual runbook every Tuesday for a year.
Manual, repetitive, automatable operational work that scales with the size of the system and produces no lasting value. It is worth naming because it hides: each instance is small and doing it feels like being helpful. The SRE convention of capping it — measuring what fraction of a team's time it consumes and treating a breach as a signal to invest — turns a slow drain into a visible, arguable number.
Full entry →