- More UK IT teams ignore alerts than the global average
- Tool sprawl is the biggest problem, false alerts are also an issue
- IT teams need to strengthen observability with more context and remediation
Three in four UK IT teams experienced outages in 2025 due to missed critical alerts, highlighting the risks not only of poor setups that led to these failures, but also so-called alert fatigue.
A new report from Splunk found poorly configured alerts meant that more than half (54%) of the respondents agreed false alerts harm morale. British IT teams are also more likely to ignore alerts as a result (15% vs 13% globally).
The report added tool sprawl (61%) causes more stress and missed alerts than false alerts (54%) and the volume of alerts (34%), which shows that a properly configured environment could actually prevent many missed alerts.
Missed and false alerts are a major problem for IT teams
Some of the common outcomes associated with this include a higher risk of downtime or breaches, customer disruption, revenue loss, reputational damage and IT staff burnout.
"[A] lack of clarity puts a lot of pressure on teams and slows response times," EMEA SVP & GM Petra Jenner explained.
Splunk's recommendations are that companies look to implement stronger observability tools that add fuller context and suggest remediation paths. The company also calls for mass simplification by reducing the number of tools and interfaces IT teams need to deal with.
But the report also highlights the importance of looking after the IT teams behind monitoring outages and fixing downtime – improving cross-team coordination and ownership is a must. "To build resilience and combat alert fatigue, organisations need to consider the psychological wellbeing of their IT staff," Jenner added.
This has already been evidenced in that two-thirds (64%) of global respondents agree that better collaboration between observability and security teams reduces customer-impacting incidents.
"With the right systems in place, alongside better cross-departmental co-ordination, teams can act quickly, with confidence and avoid the pitfalls of alert fatigue," Jenner concluded.
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Source: TechRadar
