Incidents vs. Alerts

While both incidents and alerts play pivotal roles in managing an IT ecosystem, it's essential to understand their differences.

Alert

An alert primarily targets on-call responders, notifying them of potential incidents reported by monitoring systems, ticketing tools, or other observability tools. Alerts are technical by nature, often containing details not relevant to non-technical users.

On the other hand, an incident is the primary communication tool for non-technical users. Incidents translate the technicalities of an alert into digestible information for those affected by service disruptions, focusing on business impact and user experience.

Our definition of an incident emphasizes the real-world consequences on business operations and customer experience.