Confused customer with laptop while engineer watches dashboards

Time to Customer Awareness: the Incident KPI No One Measures

In most incident response pipelines, customers begin experiencing impact at minute zero. Within a few minutes, the first support tickets arrive. By minute ten, customer-initiated posts appear in shared channels. Public status pages are typically updated somewhere between thirty and ninety minutes. The gap between when a customer first feels impact and when that customer is formally told is a measurable, important, and almost universally unmeasured KPI. Call it Time-to-Customer Awareness, or TTC-Aware. ...

February 1, 2026 · 6 min · Jared Lee
On-call engineer at multi-monitor setup with alert bells

Measuring PagerDuty Alert Noise: A Diagnostic Framework

Every on-call veteran has the same intuition: a meaningful portion of what pages us isn’t actionable. What most of us don’t have is a way to prove it — let alone to classify why a given alert is noisy. Without classification, the only lever is blunt: raise the threshold, disable the alert, ignore the channel. None of these distinguishes an alert that’s noisy because the platform self-heals from one that’s noisy because it flaps. ...

January 1, 2026 · 5 min · Jared Lee