Monitoring Distributed Systems (SRE Book, ch. 6)
https://sre.google/sre-book/monitoring-distributed-systems/
Method
none stated
Population
none stated
What it does not show
No measured evidence that symptom-based alerting reduces false pages, improves recovery time or reduces fatigue relative to cause-based alerting. These are design principles derived from experience; no page-volume or incident-outcome numbers accompany them.
Rob Ewaschuk, Betsy Beyer
Names the distinction the control rests on — “Your monitoring system should address two questions: what’s broken, and why? The ‘what’s broken’ indicates the symptom; the ‘why’ indicates a (possibly intermediate) cause” — and the fatigue mechanism: “When pages occur too frequently, employees second-guess, skim, or even ignore incoming alerts, sometimes even ignoring a ‘real’ page that’s masked by the noise.”
Tier IV: House-style practitioner guidance illustrated with two narrative examples. It states the symptom-versus-cause distinction and the alert-fatigue mechanism as doctrine, with no measured comparison of page volume or incident outcomes by alerting style.