On-Call Tech Teams Are Fatigued and Stressed

On-call IT teams are responding to an average of more than 7,700 alerts from users a year, and almost a quarter of these alerts are false alarms, according to a recent survey from VictorOps. The time spent on addressing the false alarms comes out to an estimated $140,000 annual expense for organizations, findings reveal. Given the circumstances, it's easy to see why the vast majority of tech workers said they suffer from "alert fatigue." And it doesn't help that many have to pull an on-call rotation for two weeks (or longer) at a time, leading respondents to provide the following survey comments: "I get stressed, and that causes tension, which then affects my marriage." "I always have to warn my family when it's my week on call." "I have had to leave movies, cut dates short." "It affects my health due to complications of tension and anxiety over missing family events." As troubling as the situation is, tech teams that use infrastructure automation tools said the solutions help "ease their pain." More than 500 system administrators, programmers, and other IT professionals and managers took part in the research.