Introduction

If you’ve ever been on call during a bad incident, you know the feeling: phones buzzing, Slack channels exploding, dashboards flashing red, and a dozen “P1” pages shouting for attention at once. In the confusion, truly critical signals get buried, response slows, and stress spikes.

This is alert fatigue in action—when constant, noisy notifications overload on‑call engineers so completely that it becomes hard to distinguish urgent from ignorable. The result isn’t just burnout; it’s increased downtime, missed SLAs, and real business risk.

In this post, we’ll explore a surprisingly low‑tech but powerful tool: The Paper Incident Story Switchboard—a physical, tactile “call‑routing wall” that lets you model, redesign, and debug your alerting system with sticky notes and string before you invest in complex automations. Along the way, we’ll connect this hands‑on exercise to modern practices like AI‑powered alert correlation, intelligent prioritization, and structured planning resources such as tabletop and disaster recovery templates.

The Problem: Alert Fatigue and Competing Alarms

Modern systems emit thousands of signals: logs, metrics, traces, health checks, third‑party status updates, and more. It’s tempting to page on everything that looks even slightly suspicious.

Over time, this creates:

• High alert volume: Engineers get paged constantly, often for issues that self‑resolve.
• Redundant pages: The same underlying problem triggers multiple tools and multiple teams.
• Competing severities: Several “critical” alerts appear at once, with no clear way to know which truly matters.
• Desensitization: When everything is urgent, nothing feels urgent.

Teams that tackle this problem systematically often see dramatic results: over 90% reduction in alert volume and mean time to resolution (MTTR) shrinking from hours to minutes. But getting there means understanding your alert flows deeply—what fires, when, and why.

That’s where the Paper Incident Story Switchboard comes in.

What Is the Paper Incident Story Switchboard?

Imagine a big wall (or whiteboard) that represents your on‑call universe.

On the far left you have sources of signals (monitoring tools, logs, SLO burn alerts). In the middle you have alert processing and routing (grouping, deduplication, AI correlation, escalation rules). On the right you have receivers (on‑call engineers, incident channels, runbooks, and incident commanders).

Now imagine you:

• Represent each alert type as a paper card or sticky note.
• Draw wires (string or marker lines) showing how alerts move from tools to people.
• Add switches (more sticky notes) that represent grouping rules, routing rules, escalation paths, and suppression logic.

You’ve created a low‑tech, tactile call‑routing wall—a switchboard for your incident stories.

This physical map makes it easy to:

• See where alerts fan out and multiply.
• Identify redundant or low‑value pages.
• Visualize which alarms “compete” for attention.
• Design smarter grouping, prioritization, and automation rules.

You’re essentially storyboarding your incidents and alert flows before automating them.

Step 1: Map Your Current Alert Chaos

Start by capturing reality, not the ideal.

1. Collect a week of incidents
   Grab real incidents from the last 1–4 weeks—especially painful ones. For each, export or note:

   • Alerts fired (with timestamps)
   • Which services/components were affected
   • Who was paged and how (PagerDuty, Opsgenie, SMS, Slack, etc.)
   • How long it took to acknowledge and resolve

2. Create alert cards
   For each alert type (not each individual alert instance), create a card with:

   • Name: “API 5xx rate spike,” “Database replica lag,” etc.
   • Source tool: Prometheus, Datadog, cloud monitor, etc.
   • Severity: as currently configured
   • Typical frequency: “daily,” “weekly,” “only during deploys”
   • Actionability: what the on‑call is supposed to do

3. Build the wall

   • Left column: tools and sources (one section per tool).
   • Middle: current routing and escalation (email → Slack → on‑call rotation, etc.).
   • Right column: human receivers (app on‑call, DB on‑call, SRE, incident commander, leadership, etc.).

4. Draw the real flows
   Connect each alert card from source → routing → human. Don’t “clean it up.” If one event creates eight different pages, draw all eight.

You now have a brutally honest picture of your alert chaos.

Step 2: Spot the Noise, Collisions, and Gaps

With the wall in front of you, walk through a few real incidents as stories:

“At 02:14, latency spiked in Service A. What fired first? Where did it go? Who got paged? What happened next?”

Look for:

• Redundant paths
  Multiple alerts about the same condition, all paging humans separately instead of being grouped.

• Non‑actionable pages
  Alerts that rarely require human intervention (“CPU > 80% for 30s” that always self‑resolves).

• Alert storms
  A single failure that cascades into dozens of alarms (for every downstream service, plus multiple tools).

• Conflicting priorities
  Two pages both marked “critical” but one is clearly more business‑impacting.

• Blind spots
  Serious incidents with poor or late alerting; places where no one was paged until customers complained.

Mark these with colored stickers or symbols:

• Red dot: high noise / high redundancy
• Yellow triangle: confusing or unclear ownership
• Blue square: candidate for grouping or correlation

This visual triage sets you up to redesign the system.

Step 3: Design Smarter Grouping and Prioritization

Next, turn your wall into a better switchboard.

3.1 Group by Symptoms and Stories

Replace alert‑per‑signal flows with incident‑level bundles:

• Group alerts by:

  • Service or subsystem (API, payments, auth)
  • Customer impact (checkout failures, login issues)
  • Shared root causes (database unavailability, network partition)

• Design rules such as:

  • “If 5 alerts related to the payment API fire within 3 minutes, group into one incident and page payments on‑call once.”
  • “If database primary is down, suppress downstream ‘cannot connect’ alerts or mark them as children of the main incident.”

On your paper switchboard, draw new “grouping nodes” in the middle that consolidate lines.

3.2 Re‑think Priority

Not all alerts should page a human. Create clear tiers:

• P1 / Critical: Active customer impact, data loss, major security breach.
• P2 / High: Degraded but not catastrophic; handle during working hours or with lighter paging.
• P3 / Informational: No immediate human action; route to dashboards or daily digests.

Update each card to the priority it should be, not what it is today. Many teams discover that half or more of current “P1” pages should be downgraded.

The goal: only truly urgent, actionable alerts wake people up.

Step 4: Add AI‑Powered Correlation and Routing (Conceptually)

Once you’ve done the paper exercise, you have a blueprint for automation.

Modern incident management tools (and custom pipelines) can use AI to:

• Correlate related alerts into a single incident based on timing, topology, and past incidents.
• Suppress redundant alerts once the parent incident is identified.
• Auto‑route incidents to the most likely owning team based on historical patterns.
• Propose probable root causes by comparing current signals to prior incident narratives.

On your wall, represent these with special nodes:

• “AI Correlator”: Ingests many alerts, emits one incident.
• “AI Router”: Chooses the most likely on‑call owner and channel.

You can literally label a sticky note “AI Correlator” and show which alerts it would merge. This keeps your AI plans grounded in real flows instead of abstract feature wish‑lists.

Teams that implement this thoughtfully often see:

• >90% reduction in noisy alerts hitting humans.
• MTTR dropping from hours to minutes, because responders focus on one coherent incident story instead of 50 fragmented pings.

Step 5: Connect to Tabletop Exercises and Disaster Recovery Planning

A paper switchboard is powerful on its own, but it really shines when paired with structured preparation.

5.1 Tabletop Exercises

Use incident response tabletop exercise templates to run simulated incidents against your redesigned wall:

• Pick a scenario from a template (e.g., “partial region outage,” “payment gateway latency spike”).
• Walk through: which alerts would fire now, where they’d route, who would be paged.
• Validate:
  • Are we grouping aggressively enough?
  • Does the right team get the first page?
  • Is there a clear incident commander and channel?

Tabletops reveal gaps in your switchboard design before they appear at 3 a.m.

5.2 Disaster Recovery Templates

Similarly, disaster recovery (DR) templates help you align alerts with recovery strategies:

• For each DR scenario, define:
  • Key detection signals (SLO burn, failover triggers, replication health).
  • Required recovery steps and owners.
  • Time targets (RTO/RPO) and what “too slow” looks like.

Map those detection signals as cards on your wall and ensure they:

• Have clear routing to the right responders.
• Aren’t buried in noise during large‑scale incidents.

This closes the loop between design, practice, and resilience.

The Human Side: Preventing Burnout While Staying Reliable

Alert tuning can sound purely technical, but the stakes are human.

When alert noise is high:

• On‑call engineers sleep poorly and dread rotations.
• Teams start ignoring alerts or muting channels.
• Turnover increases, taking hard‑won system knowledge with it.

When you use tools like the Paper Incident Story Switchboard to cut unnecessary alerts and focus only on high‑value signals, you:

• Preserve engineer well‑being and sustainability.
• Maintain (and often improve) reliability by making critical signals stand out.
• Create space for thoughtful post‑incident reviews and continuous improvement.

It’s not about silencing the system; it’s about teaching it to speak clearly.

Conclusion: Prototype in Paper, Automate with Confidence

Before you invest in yet another tool or write complex alert routing rules, step back and build a paper switchboard of your incident stories.

By:

• Mapping your real alert flows and on‑call paths,
• Identifying noise, collisions, and gaps,
• Designing smarter grouping and prioritization,
• Layering in AI‑powered correlation and routing concepts, and
• Validating through tabletop and disaster recovery templates,

you create a clear, shared blueprint for an alerting system that serves both your customers and your engineers.

From there, implementing automation—whether in your existing tooling or with new AI‑driven platforms—becomes far less risky and far more effective.

The Paper Incident Story Switchboard won’t fix your incidents by itself. But it gives your team a tactile, visual way to wrestle chaos into clarity—and that’s the first step toward an on‑call experience that’s resilient, humane, and reliably boring in the best possible way.