Alert Routing
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
Alert Routing decides which alerts go to which people through which channels. Database down? Page the DBA. API slow? Slack the backend team. Disk full? Email the infra team. It's the intelligent switchboard operator that makes sure the right person gets the right alert at the right time.
Real Talk
Alert routing is the process of directing monitoring alerts to appropriate responders based on rules, severity, time, service ownership, and escalation policies. Implemented in tools like PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and Alertmanager with support for deduplication, grouping, and silencing.
When You'll Hear This
"Alert routing sends P1 incidents to the phone and P3s to Slack." / "We route database alerts to the DBA team and API alerts to the backend team."
Related Terms
Escalation Policy
An Escalation Policy defines what happens when the on-call person doesn't respond. Wait 5 minutes, then page the backup.
On-Call Rotation
On-Call Rotation is a schedule where team members take turns being the person who gets woken up when production breaks.
Opsgenie
Opsgenie is PagerDuty's competitor from Atlassian. It does the same thing — routes alerts, manages on-call schedules, wakes people up.
PagerDuty
PagerDuty is the tool that wakes you up at 3 AM when production is on fire.