# From Alert Noise to Actionable Signals: Lessons from Production

> Too many alerts, still missing the real problem? Learn how leaders from Apple, Cars.com, and SLB cut alert noise and investigate root causes in production.

Source: https://openobserve.ai/webinars-videos/alert-fatigue-noise-slos-incidents-production/
Published: 2026-09-30

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Too many alerts, still missing the real problem? Hear leaders from Apple, Cars .com, and SLB share production stories about reducing alert noise, finding root causes, and prioritizing user impact.

## What you'll learn

- What should wake an engineer, what can wait, and what can be handled through automation
- How recurring failures, restarts, and disconnected investigations can hide the real problem
- How SLOs, error budgets, synthetic monitoring, and user impact help teams prioritize incidents
- What an actionable alert needs to pass the “3 a.m. test”

An alert fires, but it only shows a symptom. Small incidents keep recurring, but nobody connects them. Internal dashboards look healthy while customers can’t access the service.

Sarah Kaplan from Apple, Heather Osborn from Cars Commerce, and Barnadeep Bhowmik from SLB share how they chased down problems like these, what they missed, and what they changed afterward.

Hear how Kubernetes 503 errors led to a DNS bug, recurring PostgreSQL failures went unconnected for months, and an Active Directory issue triggered downstream alerts and three separate war rooms.

The discussion covers using SLOs, error budgets, burn rates, synthetic monitoring, and user impact to prioritize incident response, plus where AI can help correlate alerts and why engineers still need to verify its conclusions.

Watch the on-demand panel for real production lessons on alert fatigue and root cause analysis, plus an OpenObserve demo of SLO creation and burn rate alerting.

## Resources

- [Try OpenObserve](https://cloud.openobserve.ai/)
- [SLOs and Burn-Rate Alerts](https://openobserve.ai/blog/slos-and-alerts-release/)
- [Synthetic Monitoring](https://openobserve.ai/synthetic-monitoring/)