Nobody "likes" getting alerts. Best-case, you find out something went (or is going) wrong. Far more often, the alerts we receive are meaningless, trivial, or just plain wrong - a source of constant interruptions, false alarms, and noise.

While you might think this is the inherent nature of alerts, the truth is they can be not only better, but useful and even critically important. Well-crafted alerts based on insightful monitoring are a benefit to the business and a gift to IT practitioners, saving hours of investigation and thousands of dollars.

This talk will include a tour of the alerting hall of horrors, and then provide real-world, vendor-agnostic techniques to make alerts meaningful, effective, valuable, and actionable. By breaking a few bad habits; understanding how and why vendors put their tools together in particular ways; and learning a few new concepts, you'll have people emailing you to say "thank goodness I got that alert!".

Now there's something you probably don't hear every day.