The On-Call Noise Reduction Playbook

Most teams get woken up too much. The 5-step playbook that takes a noisy rotation to actionable in one quarter.

Audit the pages

List every alert that fired in the last 30 days. Mark each: real / noise / unclear.

Anything below 50% real is the priority for tuning.

Tune top offenders

Tighten threshold; widen window; add aggregation; or remove. Each option has trade-offs; pick deliberately.

Re-audit weekly to verify the change took. Some 'tuned' alerts come back noisy after a week.

Compound the wins

Each tuned alert is 1-5 fewer pages per week. Across 10-20 alerts, the rotation transforms.

Track per-shift page count. Trending down is the signal that the playbook is working.