Alert fatigue

When everything sounds urgent, nothing is important

Alert fatigue occurs when the volume of notifications and alerts becomes so high that you lose the ability to distinguish between what requires immediate attention and what doesn’t.

Essentially, your mind becomes “accustomed” to the constant barrage of information, causing important alerts to go unnoticed or ignored.

The result is familiar: delayed responses, loss of focus, and a growing sense of burnout that can eventually lead to real incidents and a mental load that’s difficult to sustain. The burnout experienced by cybersecurity personnel translates into lower productivity, errors, and ultimately, increased turnover among experts.

From critical surveillance to permanent noise

Excessive alerts don’t occur overnight; they are the result of a series of small imbalances that normalize over time. Monitoring systems that were once allies become noise generators. These are the most common reasons:

• Excessive volume: Too many events are reported, many of them irrelevant.
• Poor alert design: If the alert does not provide context, does not indicate severity, or generates many false alarms, it loses impact.
• False positives: Alerts that don’t pose a real risk but consume analysis time. The team gets used to “hoping it’s nothing,” and in the long run, this generates distrust in the system.
• Lack of adjustment to the context: Many alerts are configured generically, without taking into account which application, what traffic, what user profile is involved, or the impact that unavailability would have.
• Cognitive overload: Maintaining 24/7 surveillance generates a level of attention that is difficult to sustain.
• Disconnected tools: When systems do not share information, noise increases and relevance is diluted.

Each of these wake-up calls, which can be managed separately, when combined carries a risk: fatigue, loss of judgment, and emotional disconnection in the face of alerts. What was once a warning sign becomes just one interruption among many.

The impact on technical teams

In a global survey conducted by Kaspersky in 2025, 18% of cybersecurity professionals explicitly named “alert fatigue” as one of the main weaknesses of their protection systems.

Constant exposure to surveillance situations produces stress and diminishes the ability to make accurate decisions. In critical environments, this margin of error can translate into reduced operational performance, financial losses, and even reputational losses.

The solution isn’t learning to “be more resilient,” but rather filtering, prioritizing, and automating information to identify what’s truly critical.

How to reduce alert fatigue

The most effective approach combines three axes: intelligent configuration, unified observability, and expert support.

• Setting thresholds and priorities: Define what warrants an alert and what can be resolved automatically.
• Operating context: An alert should provide sufficient information to take action without relying on multiple sources.
• Selective automation: Delegate repetitive tasks to the system to free up technical staff time.
• Centralized anomaly analysis: bring together traffic, performance, and security events in a single dashboard.
• Continuous evaluation: Periodically review the effectiveness of alerts and their thresholds, eliminating unnecessary noise.

More serene incident management

Transparent Edge helps reduce alert fatigue through a configurable anomaly detection system that allows thresholds to be tailored to the specific needs of each website or web application.

Notifications are customized independently or based on criteria defined by our expert team, to avoid duplication and prioritize what truly requires attention.

The result will be fewer irrelevant alerts, greater responsiveness, and a team that works with clarity, not confusion.