The set of techniques (deduplication, correlation, inhibition, severity tiering) that turn thousands of raw alerts into a manageable signal.
Noise reduction in alerting is the discipline of taking a flood of raw events from monitoring and reducing them to actionable incidents. The standard techniques are deduplication (collapsing repeats of the same alert), correlation (grouping alerts that share a likely root cause), inhibition (suppressing children when the parent fires), severity tiering (Sev-1 paged, Sev-3 emailed), and time windows (5-minute rollups instead of per-event). Best-in-class noise reduction takes 10,000 raw events and produces 50 incidents.
Without noise reduction, on-call is a fire hose and the human becomes the filter. That filter is the slowest, most expensive, and most error-prone in the system. Investing in correlation engines and well-tuned inhibition is the single biggest lever on alert fatigue, which is the single biggest driver of senior SRE attrition.
See the part of the platform that handles noise reduction in production.