Cutting through the noise: Why adaptive observability is the antidote to alert fatigue
In today’s financial systems, milliseconds matter. Every trading halt, every payment system outage, every unexpected latency spike carries consequences measured in lost revenue, customer trust, and regulatory scrutiny.
Yet behind many high-profile IT failures lies a quieter, persistent threat: alert fatigue.
As technology leaders and engineers, we’ve all felt it: the relentless noise of monitoring systems flooding teams with thousands of alerts, most of them irrelevant. It’s not just exhausting; it’s a barrier to resilience.
To meet the operational risk (OR) challenges of today and tomorrow, financial institutions must evolve beyond static, legacy approaches to monitoring. It’s time for adaptive observability.
The cost of missed signals in a noisy world
When the Chicago Board Options Exchange’s opening auction stalled for over 10 minutes in April 2024, traders lost millions in liquidity. A few months later, a UK bank suffered a three-day outage that froze online banking, ATM, and card transactions, forcing £7.5 million in customer compensation and triggering a Parliamentary inquiry.
In both cases, post-mortems revealed a common theme: operational teams overwhelmed by alert noise, unable to see the anomalies that really mattered.
These aren’t isolated failures. They are symptoms of an outdated monitoring paradigm, one that leaves organizations drowning in false positives while blind to evolving risks.
Why static thresholds fail modern IT
Traditional monitoring relies on static thresholds, hardcoded upper and lower limits to define what’s “normal.” This approach worked when IT estates were simpler. But today’s environments are:
- Dynamic – Cloud, on-premises, hybrid architectures
- Fast-moving – High-frequency trading, 24/7 payment processing
- Complex – Thousands of interdependent services and metrics
Static thresholds can’t keep up. They:
- Generate excessive noise – Alerting for predictable workload changes like month-end spikes or trading surges
- Miss subtle anomalies – Blind to gradual shifts in system behavior
- Drain engineering resources – Requiring constant manual tuning that doesn’t scale
This is how alert fatigue sets in, engineering and operations teams so inundated with irrelevant alerts they struggle to detect and respond to real incidents.
Alert fatigue is a boardroom problem
Make no mistake: alert fatigue isn’t just a technical nuisance. It’s an operational risk exposure.
For financial services, where downtime can mean millions in losses per minute and permanent customer attrition, the inability to detect and respond swiftly to emerging issues isn’t acceptable.
Boards and regulators increasingly expect firms to demonstrate operational resilience, the ability to anticipate, withstand, and recover from disruption. Legacy monitoring approaches jeopardize that expectation.
Adaptive observability – A smarter, quieter approach
Adaptive observability offers a step-change. At its core is adaptive baselining, powered by Dynamic Thresholds that continuously learn from historical trends and adjust in real time.
How it works
Instead of hardcoding limits, adaptive systems analyze past behavior to define what’s “normal” at a granular level.
Take a trading application:
- Over a 7-day period, transaction volumes show four predictable peaks during trading hours
- Using a 5-minute granularity, the system builds a seasonal model to recognize these patterns
- Alerts are triggered only when live activity deviates meaningfully from this learned baseline, not for routine fluctuations
The result? Noise is dramatically reduced, and anomalies surface faster, giving teams critical time to respond before small issues escalate.
Benefits that scale across teams
For engineering teams:
- Reduced triage workload – Focus on solving problems, not sifting false positives
- Continuous self-tuning – No manual threshold management
- Faster detection – Lower mean time to detect (MTTD) and resolve (MTTR)
For business leaders:
- Fewer incidents – Protect uptime and revenue
- Stronger SLAs – Meet rising customer and regulatory expectations
- Resilience as a competitive edge – Turn operational excellence into market differentiation
This is how alert fatigue sets in, engineering and operations teams so inundated with irrelevant alerts they struggle to detect and respond to real incidents.
From reactive firefighting to proactive resilience
In a world where IT systems underpin critical economic activity, resilience is no longer optional, it’s a strategic advantage.
By addressing alert fatigue and enabling teams to focus on meaningful anomalies, adaptive observability empowers organizations to shift from reactive firefighting to proactive risk management.
Challenge the status quo
The noise won’t quiet itself. It takes bold leadership to challenge entrenched monitoring practices and embrace adaptive approaches.
The good news? The tools exist today to build quieter, smarter, and more resilient systems. The question is: will you wait for the next headline-making outage, or act now to prevent it?
Ready to move beyond noise?
Learn how ITRS Geneos Dynamic Thresholds can help your teams cut through alert fatigue and build resilient operations.