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Software Engineering vocabulary · Debugging and Troubleshooting

Alert

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

/əˈlɜrt/nounCore term

In software engineering, alert means: An automatic notification sent to engineers when a monitored value crosses a limit or something looks wrong, for example when the error rate is too high.

In Turkish: alarm, uyarı, alert

How it is used

Alerts fire, trigger, go off and get resolved or acknowledged. Too many unimportant ones cause 'alert fatigue', and engineers learn to ignore them. Alerts often go to Slack, email or paging tools like PagerDuty.

Example sentences

  1. An alert fired at 2 a.m. because the queue had more than 10,000 messages waiting.

  2. This alert is too noisy. Let's raise the threshold so it only fires for real problems.

Common collocations

  • an alert fires
  • alert threshold
  • acknowledge an alert
  • alert fatigue
  • noisy alert
  • monitoringContinuously collecting and checking data about systems, such as CPU use, error rates and response times, so that problems are noticed quickly.
  • metricA number measured regularly over time to show how a system is behaving, such as CPU use, memory, request count or error rate.
  • on-callAvailable outside normal hours to respond quickly if an alert or incident happens. Engineers take turns being on call for their services.
  • incidentAn unplanned event that disrupts a service or makes it worse for users, such as an outage, a big slowdown or a data problem, and that needs a quick response.
  • dashboardA screen that shows the most important metrics and charts about a system in one place, so engineers can see its health at a glance.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Debugging and Troubleshooting

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