Monitoring tools track what’s happening across your systems and send a Slack message or email when something looks off. But they don’t call anyone and they don’t escalate the incident. If that Slack message goes unseen at 3 AM on a Saturday, the incident just sits there until someone opens their dashboard.
Incident alerting fills this gap. When an incident triggers, it contacts the right person directly through a phone call or their preferred channel. And if that person doesn’t respond within a set time, it moves to the next person in line until someone acknowledges it.
Here’s what this looks like on a real incident.
The notification nobody saw
A payment service starts throwing errors at midnight on a Saturday. Your monitoring tool catches it immediately and fires a Slack notification to the team channel. Nobody sees it. The on-call responder is asleep and Slack is on silent. The incident sits there for three hours until a customer emails support saying checkout is broken.
That three-hour gap is the real cost of monitoring without alerting. The data was there and the notification went out. But without a reliable way to reach someone directly, the information went nowhere.
With proper incident alerting, the sequence is different. When the incident triggers, it calls the on-call responder directly. If they don’t pick up within five minutes, it calls the next person in line. The incident gets acknowledged within minutes rather than hours and the team is working on a fix before customers notice anything.
That’s the difference between knowing something went wrong and making sure the right person is told about it. And it comes down to how monitoring and alerting each do their job.
Where monitoring ends and alerting begins
Monitoring gives you visibility into your system. It tracks response times, error rates and how things behave under load. You might notice API latency creeping up at peak traffic and use that data to decide whether to scale or fix a bottleneck. It’s not just for catching failures but for understanding how your system actually runs.
That understanding is also what makes alerting meaningful. Once you know what normal looks like, you can set thresholds that matter. When something crosses one of those thresholds, alerting takes over.
You’re not watching a dashboard around the clock because the system tells you when something needs attention.
The gap between when an incident triggers and when your team finds out is where things go wrong. A reliable alerting setup closes that gap regardless of the time or day. Spike is built to make sure the right person always gets the call.
FAQs
When should you set up incident alerting?
As soon as you have at least one service that needs to be reliable. That’s not just limited to your main production services either. Even a background job that runs once a day is worth covering if a failure there would cause real problems.
Our team works in the same timezone. Do we still need incident alerting?
A shared timezone helps during business hours but nights and weekends are a different story. A critical incident at 11 PM on a Friday affects your team regardless of where everyone is located. Without alerting, there’s no guarantee anyone finds out until the next morning.
How does incident alerting connect to our existing monitoring tools?
Incident alerting tools connect to monitoring tools through integrations or webhooks. When your monitoring tool fires a notification, the alerting tool picks it up and handles delivery and escalation from there.