Stop Writing Alert Rules By Hand

At some point every engineering team has the same meeting. "We need better alerting." Someone opens a spreadsheet. You list every service. You decide on thresholds. Error rate above X. Latency above Y. CPU above Z. You spend a day writing rules in Prometheus, CloudWatch, or Datadog. Two weeks later, three of the rules are too noisy and get silenced. Five more never fire because the thresholds are too conservative. And the next production incident is something nobody predicted, so none of the rules cover it. This cycle repeats every six months. Sometimes every quarter. The alert rules pile up but coverage never feels complete. The fundamental problem with static thresholds A static threshold assumes the system behaves the same way all the time. "Alert when error rate exceeds 5%" treats Monday at 9am the same as Sunday at 3am. But your traffic patterns are different. Your error baseline is different. The same error rate might be normal during a traffic spike and catastrophic during off-h