Alert fatigue explained
Alert fatigue, sometimes known as alarm fatigue, happens when security team members are desensitized by too many notifications, leading them to miss critical signals and legitimate warnings.
We all know this story from childhood: A boy is bored out in the field guarding his sheep and decides to see what happens if he pretends a wolf is attacking.
The first time the boy cries wolf, everyone comes running from town. When they see that there’s no wolf, they grumble and eventually wander away. The second time the boy cries wolf, folks still come running—but a little slower this time. And this time, they’re pretty angry.
The third time, the villagers refuse to come. Unfortunately, that’s the time an actual wolf shows up, and in some versions of the story, it eats all the sheep—and the foolish shepherd boy, too.
We see this story playing out every day in security operations centers (SOCs) all over the world.
Security tools are designed to alert your team members to a particular risk (and that’s a good thing!). But when there are too many alerts coming in for security teams to handle, and the alerts aren’t true or meaningful or helpful, people get burnt out. That can lead to missed alerts and slower cloud incident response times. And sometimes, there really is a predatory “wolf” out there ready to take advantage of your overburdened team.
In this post, we’ll look at what causes alert fatigue, why it’s so dangerous, and some best practices you can take to prevent it.
What causes alert fatigue?
Alert fatigue is part of human nature and no quantity of security tools can prevent it. In fact, there’s such a thing as having too many security tools, each flooding the team with alerts.
In the SOC, alert fatigue can emerge as a response to too many tools working ineffectively, tools that don’t adapt to the way your security teams work, or tools that don’t give security teams the information they need to actually fix the problem.
For example, you might have…
Multiple siloed security solutions generating alerts for the same problem
Alerts about something that isn’t a legitimate or major problem (such as a difficult-to-exploit vulnerability on an internal-only server with no internet exposure)
Vague or uninformative alerts that lack context to help find and fix the problem
Difficulty prioritizing alerts as critical or non-critical due to insufficient data
A lack of team training to prioritize and resolve alerts in a timely way
Complex multi-cloud environments also contribute significantly to alert fatigue.
When you have multiple services and resources spread over multiple providers, few of which are acting in coordination with one another, you’ll inevitably end up with more alerts. There’s also a lack of centralized visibility, leading to confusing, conflicting alerts.
False positives or multiple alerts for the same issue can waste your team’s time. And, of course, the sheer likelihood of misconfigurations and alerts goes up as your environment becomes more complex.
The truth is that with all of these factors competing for attention, many organizations develop a mindset of overlooking and ignoring alerts just so they can get through the day. This is dangerous—and stops your organization from maturing to a safer overall security posture.
How does alert fatigue impact your business?
Alert fatigue will have a big impact on your cybersecurity operations, including an increased risk of breaches. If the shepherd is crying wolf and nobody’s listening…well, sometimes there really is a wolf.
Beyond a breach, other potential risks of ignoring alert fatigue include missed or ignored alerts because teams are busy or tune out alerts and employee burnout from chasing meaningless or non-actionable alerts.
Let’s look at how these alert fatigue scenarios play out across a variety of industries:
Healthcare
A hospital’s Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solution floods staff with thousands of low-priority alerts. And that flood manages to bury a cryptominer warning that encrypts MRI machines, halting diagnostic capabilities for 48 hours.
Here’s a real-world example of how one healthcare data provider cut alert fatigue while safeguarding sensitive patient data.
Manufacturing
A factory’s intrusion detection system (IDS) blasts out hundreds of alerts, masking a malware attack that damages the production floor’s robotic arms, slashing output by 30% over a one-week period and affecting critical delivery deadlines.
SaaS vendor
Over time, DevOps and security have learned to ignore routine container deployment alerts. This leads them to miss a critical vulnerability that leaks customer data, impacting a planned launch date.
Finance
A bank’s SOC skips noisy alerts, letting a phishing scam siphon hundreds of thousands of dollars from client accounts, sparking lawsuits and a stock dip.
Don’t forget that beyond these impacts, alert fatigue can also have major psychological and operational impacts on your teams. It can harm morale and productivity, and employees who are burnt out will either work less efficiently or seek more rewarding work in a better corporate culture.
Of course, the impacts can be even more catastrophic if a breach does occur as a result.
The answer is NOT to punish the SOC team or add more tool burden—there’s enough on their plates as it is. So what are some things you can do to fix the problem?
How to prevent or reduce alert fatigue: Best practices
The one thing you should never, ever do, is ignore alerts.
As mentioned, some organizations develop a culture of tolerating over-alerting; there are many situations in which managers tell people in their departments to ignore certain alerts, and that leads to a very dangerous mindset.
Security teams’ mindset should always be, “When we receive an alert, we must take action to resolve it ASAP.”
Here are some steps to help you get there, in order from most basic to most complex:
Use filters to remove meaningless and duplicate alerts: Most security solutions include basic filtering, which allows you to train the software to be less sensitive and issue fewer alerts over time.
Ensure all alerts are actionable, with instructions to find and fix: This may involve some degree of scripting and automation to ensure that full details and remediation steps are available for all alerts.
Include context with all alerts to prioritize critical threats: Integrate data from multiple sources, using customized security solutions if needed, and ensure alerts are enriched with this context prior to triage.
Adopt tools for SOC automation to reduce triage and cut response times: Over time, begin creating workflows and playbooks that take some of the burden of alert handling—or at least of initial response—off your team’s shoulders. Some solutions may help automate data correlation and analysis for the SOC, for example, using AI-powered or custom logic automations to relieve manual workload and reduce time to respond.
Minimize siloed point solutions in favor of unified solutions: This best practice may involve longer-term planning, but it will help your organization achieve greater cybersecurity maturity and preparedness by combining context and tooling across network, compute, identity, data, secrets, SaaS, and PaaS layers. A unified solution can also help with compliance by bringing all your configurations together under one roof.
To make responding to alerts a priority for all your teams, you can establish reasonable, industry-standard KPIs (such as mean time to resolve, or MTTR). This will help you track improvement or identify areas where teams need extra support.
Yes, it can take some time to fine-tune filters and get alerting working correctly. But with the right tools—especially if your tools are integrated and working together—you can build a culture that prioritizes alerts without stressing your team.
Cloud Detection and Response for Dummies
Everything you need to know about detection and response for the cloud.
Download report
Wiz: Your long-term solution to alert fatigue
As a cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) with native cloud detection and response (CDR), Wiz gives you an all-in-one solution that helps end alert fatigue by bringing all your security solutions under one roof.
Together, Wiz Code and Wiz Cloud reduce alert fatigue by combining context-rich prioritization with holistic cloud-to-code visibility so your security teams can focus on what truly matters.
Then, Wiz Defend helps raise high-fidelity, precise alerts when an emerging threat occurs, helping Security Operation teams block or contain cloud attacks before they become breaches.
Wiz Code
Wiz Code reduces alert fatigue early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) by eliminating issues before they reach production—and by ensuring alerts are developer-friendly.
Wiz Code makes security part of your developers’ workflow in a number of ways:
Code + cloud correlation: Wiz Code scans IaC, containers, and pipelines and shows whether issues in code are actually exploitable in the live cloud environment. If they’re not exploitable, Wiz suppresses the alert.
CI/CD guardrails: To prevent misconfigurations or secrets from ever reaching production, Wiz Code enforces policies directly in code pipelines.
Developer context: Wiz Code surfaces issues and includes remediation guidance directly in dev tools (e.g., GitHub PRs, IDEs), reducing back-and-forth with security teams.
The end result: Developers are only alerted about code risks that actually matter, and security teams aren’t bombarded with false positives from pre-prod scans.
Wiz Cloud
Wiz Cloud eliminates noise by enriching alerts with cloud context and filtering out the low-risk ones.
With one easy-to-understand dashboard, Wiz Cloud gives you vulnerability management with deep context that cuts through the noise of traditional CSPM tools. And the Wiz Security Graph lets you visualize attack paths and prioritize threat remediation workflows, allowing security teams to focus on the most critical risks.
Here are just a few of the ways that Wiz Cloud simplifies your cloud security:
A graph-based risk engine correlates vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, identities, and secrets across the environment to identify toxic combinations (e.g., an internet-exposed VM with a critical vuln and excessive permissions).
Attack path analysis highlights exploitable paths attackers could use and lets teams focus on risks that are reachable and impactful—not just theoretical issues.
Smarter triage includes alerts that are tagged and filtered based on environment (prod vs. dev), workload type, ownership, or crown jewel status.
The end result: Instead of thousands of isolated issues, teams get a prioritized list of actual attack paths and critical exposures.
By correlating risks from source code to runtime, Wiz connects findings across the SDLC and cloud infrastructure. This unified view helps security and DevOps teams…
Avoid duplicated alerts across tools
Align on what’s actually exploitable and needs fixing now
Continuously monitor risk posture with minimal noise
Wiz Defend
With a powerful detection analysis engine and complete coverage of cloud workloads and the control plane, Wiz Defend gives you real-time cloud defense that eliminates alert noise and manual workload that is traditionally associated with EDR and SIEM tools.
And the Investigation Graph lets you visualize threats’ blast radius and provides multiple cloud-native response actions for blocking, containment, or remediation of infrastructure or application at the code-level, allowing SecOps teams to detect and respond to threats 10x faster, with many customers reporting MTTRs under an hour
Here are just a few of the ways that Wiz Defend simplifies your Cloud SecOps:
Detection engine with behavioral analysis to trigger precise cross-layer threat detections, powered by our Wiz Research Team, reducing alert noise and wasted effort
A graph-based investigation interface with a simplified, unified, and visual storyline and timeline that brings together context from across compute, network, data, identity, SaaS, PaaS, and Kubernetes layers without the manual data gathering and correlation.
AI-power investigation and response includes cloud-native containment and response automations and one-click playbooks for resolving the issue at the workload, resources, identity, data permissions, or code-level.
The end result: Instead of thousands of low-fidelity detections, teams get a prioritized list of coverage gaps and emerging threats, with full context and guidance to be able to close gaps and investigate and respond with confidence.
With Wiz, your teams can take action, close out the alert, and get on with their lives—avoiding frustration and burnout.
Alert fatigue puts your entire organization at risk. Click here for a free demo to see how Wiz can give all your teams peace of mind—all the way from code to cloud.
