Pager Debt

ELI5 — The Vibe Check

Pager debt is the accumulated noise in your alerting system — the dozens of alerts that page someone but don't actually need a human. Every unfixed false positive is interest. Eventually the interest payments alone ruin on-call.

Real Talk

Pager debt is the backlog of alert-hygiene work that a team has deferred: noisy alerts, duplicate alerts, alerts without runbooks, alerts on vanity metrics. Like technical debt, pager debt compounds — each new alert is easier to add than to remove, and the total noise level degrades incident response over time. Quarterly alert audits pay it down.

When You'll Hear This

"Our pager debt is crushing the team — half the pages are garbage." / "Budget a week per quarter for pager-debt cleanup."