Ditch all alerts that aren't actionable

The method of using email as a sort of alert queue is a terribly broken system. Yes, it's a system that I have to deal with every day. Yes, I get 100-200+ emails a day, between alerts and recoveries... often of which are rolled up in "alert packages", which are just as useless.

There needs to be a separation for all the to-do list, alert-spam, bullshit that typically ends up in my email inbox. I'd really love it if I could get back to using my email, ya know, like an electronic replacement for mail. Little communications or thought out letters. Not this inundation of crap that I currently deal with.

The startup that fixes this, wins.

It's not, but the same rule applies.

Much of the past year has been tweaking Nagios and other alert settings. Some have been disabled entirely, some simply set to much more sane values (as in: if this value is hit, things are not sane).

My read:

If you can't take some action within an alert interval to change / make things better, you don't need to know about it.

If alert A means that condition B has already occurred (e.g.: site is down, whatever), then alert A is 1) useless and 2) will be polluting your (likely already overstressed) mental bandwidth / handheld device constraints at a time when it's least convenient.

E.g.: while you're trying to read a really, really crappy vendor manual in Android's PDF viewer, which helpfully resets you back to page 1 of 892 every time you navigate away from the document -- say, because a new mail/SMS alert has just arrived.

The anomalous condition should be logged for forensics, and explored for predictive ability, but if it's not triggered until the shit's already hit the fan, ditch the alerting, keep the logging.

I remember you doing exactly that with Hacker Newsletter. :)

That is great advice though - I had several Google and Twitter alerts setup, but then I realized I was never doing anything with them so I axed 'em. Another thing to watch out for is recurring todo list items that you never actually do.

Put mathematically, if P(X|Y) = P(X|~Y), then knowing Y really doesn't help.

My last job "errors" would get logged and the team would get emailed. We'd get 5+ error emails a day, but they were always expected and always ignored. Of course, when a real error comes in, you just write it off as one of the expected errors. 30 minutes later users are screaming at you....

Any immediate alerting that relies on email communication is broken. You should not be constantly having to watch your inbox simply to be parsing messages to figure out what alerts are meaningful. Let the machines do that work for you by setting up and constantly refining your alerts correctly.

My conclusion is, use many alerts, you never know when they become useful. But use the filter functions of your email client (auto-archive in Gmail for instance) even more.

I am, simultaneously, running my own startup, doing freelancing development work for clients, and running the Infrastructure Consulting arm of another successful small company. That's all not to mention running my own personal sites and web projects. Each of these positions result in my getting a HUGE deluge of email, automated alerts, and spam - every single day.

I've tried a number of different methods for reducing noise, and none of them have worked very well for me yet. I tried setting up folder routing rules in Outlook - it resulted in my missing a couple of key alerts for client systems which resulted in very unhappy clients asking me, "Aren't you guys monitoring our systems..." when they had to call to let me know their critical systems were down.

I've tried scheduling set times during the day for email (and ignoring it outside of those times) and, while this has been my most successful method to date, it still just makes me dread the Email Hour in the morning and the other one in the Afternoon - resulting in my subconsciously finding excuses to skip "Email Hour"...

If any of my fellow HN'ers have suggestions in this regard, I'd love the feedback!