/əˈlɜːr.tɪŋ/
noun — "the system’s way of screaming at you before things go wrong."
Alerting in information technology is the process of notifying administrators, operators, or systems about abnormal conditions, failures, or threshold breaches in IT infrastructure, applications, or services. It enables rapid response to incidents, helping maintain uptime, reliability, and security.
Technically, Alerting involves:
- Monitoring — continuously observing systems, applications, or network metrics.
- Thresholds and rules — defining conditions that trigger alerts.
- Notification channels — delivering alerts via email, SMS, dashboards, or collaboration tools.
- Incident escalation — prioritizing and routing alerts to appropriate responders.
Examples of Alerting include:
- Sending an email when server CPU usage exceeds 90% for a sustained period.
- Triggering an SMS when a network switch goes down.
- Generating a ticket in an IT service management system when an application error occurs.
Conceptually, Alerting is the early warning system of IT operations—it ensures problems are noticed and addressed before they escalate into major incidents.
In practice, Alerting integrates with Monitoring, Logging, Event Management, and Network Monitoring to provide comprehensive visibility and actionable notifications.
See Monitoring, Logging, Event Management, Network Monitoring, Audit Trail.