What’s a leading indicator in alerting?

A signal that predicts user impact before it fully materializes: SLO burn rates (multi-window), queue lag growth, tail latency acceleration, connection pool saturation, circuit breaker open ratio, and OOM events. These correlate with incidents far better than raw CPU or disk.

How do I avoid flapping alerts?

Use recording rules to stabilize expressions, add `for:` durations to require persistence, and set multi-window conditions (e.g., 5m AND 1h). Group alerts and use inhibition to prevent cascades. Test in staging with replayed traffic if possible.

How do I route to the right on-call automatically?

Label alerts with `owner` from your service catalog (e.g., Backstage). Configure Alertmanager to include that label in the PagerDuty event so incidents auto-assign to the service’s on‑call schedule.

Can I automate rollbacks without Argo Rollouts?

Yes. Flagger, Spinnaker (Kayenta), and even CI/CD hooks can gate deploys on Prometheus queries. As a fallback, wire an Alertmanager webhook to a small handler that pauses a deployment or flips a feature flag.

What should I measure to know it’s working?

Pages per engineer per week, MTTA, MTTR, false-positive rate, alert volume by source, and deploy-related incident rate. Expect a 40–70% page reduction if you shift to SLO burn + saturation and fix routing.

Reliability-observability · Nov 3, 2025 · 10 minute read

Stop the Pager Pinball: Intelligent Alert Routing that Predicts Incidents and Triggers Safe Rollbacks

Cut pages by focusing on SLO burn and saturation—not CPU blips—and wire alerts to triage, canaries, and feature flags so rollouts self-protect.

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Stop the Pager Pinball: Intelligent Alert Routing that Predicts Incidents and Triggers Safe Rollbacks

Key takeaways

Implementation checklist