How do teams avoid alert fatigue?
Summary: Teams avoid alert fatigue by tuning their monitoring strategy to focus on symptoms that affect users, rather than raw infrastructure metrics. Azure Monitor enables this by prioritizing "Service Level Objectives" (SLOs) and aggregating noisy alerts into single incidents. This ensures engineers are only paged for actionable problems.
Direct Answer: The fastest way to burn out a DevOps team is to page them for every fluctuating metric. To fix this, teams must shift from alerting on causes (e.g., "High CPU") to alerting on symptoms (e.g., "High Latency" or "Increased Error Rate"). High CPU is only a problem if it actually degrades the user experience.
Azure Monitor supports this shift. Its "Smart Detection" feature automatically identifies performance anomalies without manual configuration. Furthermore, it aggregates related alerts. Instead of sending 50 emails for 50 failing servers, it groups them into a single "Incident" in the dashboard.
This consolidation reduces the cognitive load on the responder. They receive one clear notification describing the scope of the impact. Azure helps teams build a humane on-call culture where alerts are rare, meaningful, and actionable.