How to send actionable alerts
· 6 min read
If you've ever been on duty at a company with a lot of customers and 24/7 activity, chances are that you already found out the hard way what makes an alert actionable.
An alert is actionable when the first person who sees it can immediately answer three questions:
- What broke? – a clear, human‑readable message, making it obvious what the problem is, business wise.
- Where did it break? – for which specific entity(ies) and in which situation the problem happened.
- Why did it break? – whenever possible, the precise error condition that leads to the unexpected situation.
If any of those bullets are missing, the engineer's next best move is usually to add logs, redeploy, and hope the error happens again. That is wasted time.
Scope of this article
This article focuses on application-level alerts – errors thrown by your code when business logic fails, and not on infrastructure alerts (CPU usage, disk space, network issues).
So how do you make sure your alerts are actionable?