A good page is urgent, actionable, and tied to user impact, with a runbook link attached. Anything else should be a ticket or a dashboard. To clean up a rotation, pull a month of pages, count them per alert, and delete or downgrade anything routinely acknowledged with no action taken. Replace cause based alerts with symptom based SLO burn rate alerts and set a page budget per shift.
Why interviewers ask this
Alert fatigue is a real reliability risk, since a rotation that pages forty times a week trains people to ignore the one that matters. Interviewers want a data driven cleanup process, the symptom versus cause distinction, and evidence you would actually delete alerts rather than adding more. Naming a target page rate shows you have owned a rotation.
How to structure your answer
- State the three tests a page must pass: urgent, actionable, user impacting.
- Pull the data: pages per alert, per shift, and action taken.
- Delete or downgrade the alerts that never lead to action.
- Move from cause based alerts to SLO burn rate alerts.
- Set a page budget and treat exceeding it as a bug.
Example answer
My test is simple: does it need a human right now, can that human do something about it, and does a user care. If any of those is no, it is a ticket or a graph, not a page. For cleanup I always start from data, so I export a month of pages grouped by alert rule and add a column for what the responder actually did. Last time I did this, four rules accounted for over 70% of pages and every one of them was resolved with acknowledge and no action. Those got deleted, not tuned. Then I replaced a wall of cause based rules like disk at 80% and pod restarted with burn rate alerts on the SLO, so we page when users are being hurt at a rate that will exhaust the error budget, and we let the causes show up on dashboards during the investigation. We set a target of fewer than two pages per shift and treated a breach as a defect with a ticket, which kept it honest.
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See how it worksFollow-up questions to expect
- How would you structure fast and slow burn rate alerts together?
- What do you do about an alert that is noisy but occasionally real?
- How would you handle a team that resists deleting their alerts?
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