Decoder. plain-English AI glossary

Alerting

● Core

Automated notifications when metrics or logs hit a threshold—latency spike, error rate jump, model drift.

Think of it like

A smoke alarm that wakes you up when there is danger, not you checking the house every minute.

Example

Inference latency p99 > 500ms triggers a PagerDuty alert; on-call engineer sees it within 30 seconds.

How it actually works

Alert fatigue kills response: if 90% of alerts are false positives, the on-call engineer will ignore them. Tune thresholds carefully and use multi-signal rules (not just one metric). Routing rules send the right alert to the right team. Must include runbook links to unblock engineers.

For product teams

Dramatically shortens time-to-incident and time-to-resolution.

For engineers

Rules engine (Prometheus, Datadog, CloudWatch) evaluates conditions on metrics; fires webhook, email, or SMS; integrates with incident management.

Related

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