The desensitization that happens when on-call engineers receive so many low-quality alerts that they begin missing the real ones.
Alert fatigue is the operational and psychological cost of receiving too many alerts of too low quality. The team mutes channels, sets stricter notification rules, or simply stops checking, and at that point, the next real incident lands in a dead zone. Causes are well-known: thresholds set too tight, no severity tiers, no deduplication, no inhibition during planned maintenance, and runbooks that don't match the firing alert.
Alert fatigue is the leading cause of senior SRE attrition. Replacing one senior SRE costs $300K-$600K in recruiting, onboarding, and lost institutional knowledge. The math alone justifies investing in noise reduction, even before counting the missed-incident risk.
See the part of the platform that handles alert fatigue in production.