So Many Alerts That None Got Seen
Our Dream Team bots leave a one-line report in a Slack channel every time they finish a job. At first it felt reassuring, a sign that things were running. Then one Tuesday the count hit fourteen alerts in a day, and the one that actually mattered, a 「token expired」 notice, got buried in the middle. I found it two days later. The bot had spoken clearly. I just hadn't heard it.
A Small Experiment: One Week of Bundling
There were only three rules.
• Routine reports are bundled into one message at 6 PM
• Only urgent alerts, like failures and expiries, are sent immediately
• The digest starts with a single line: 「What to check today」
[Evening digest] Done 11 / Needs a look 1 / Failed 0
What to check today: one scheduled job ran twice
Results
| Item | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Alerts per day | 14 | around 3 |
| Time to notice an urgent alert | about 2 days | same day |
| Times opening Slack | constantly | 2 to 3 per day |
These numbers are based on gut-feel notes, so the sample is small. Still, the direction was clear: with fewer alerts, the remaining ones actually got read.
What We Learned
More alerts do not make you feel safer. Being able to tell them apart does. Since the bots on the Windows device and the Mac mini all speak in the same channel, a one-line rule separating 「urgent」 from 「just a report」 made the biggest difference. The next experiment is letting the digest fold away items that repeat every single day.