Alert Noise Score Calculator
Score how noisy your alerting is from the ratio of false-positive and auto-resolved alerts to total alerts fired.
Inputs
Total alert notifications sent over the measurement period.
Alerts that fired but did not correspond to a real, actionable problem.
Alerts that resolved on their own before anyone took action (may indicate overly sensitive thresholds).
Alert Noise Score
40.0%
Rating
High noise — significant alert fatigue risk
Actionable Alert Rate
60.0%
Noise Alerts
200alerts
Step by step
Noise alerts: false positives + auto-resolved
80 + 120
= 200 alerts
Noise score: noise / total × 100
200 / 500 × 100
= 40.0%
Rating
based on noise score thresholds
= High noise — significant alert fatigue risk
How it works
Noise score = (false_positives + auto_resolved) / total_alerts × 100. Both categories represent alerts that didn't require the human response an alert implies: false positives never reflected a real problem, and auto-resolved alerts fixed themselves before anyone acted. A high noise score is the leading driver of alert fatigue — responders start ignoring or delaying response to a channel that's frequently wrong or self-resolving.
Formula
noise_score = (non_actionable_alerts / total_alerts) × 100
- non_actionable_alerts
- Alerts that required no action (false positives, auto-resolved)
- total_alerts
- Total alerts fired in the period
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a 0% noise score achievable or even desirable?
It's rarely achievable in practice — some legitimate transient issues will always auto-resolve before action is needed. Most well-tuned alerting systems land in the 5-15% range rather than exactly zero.
What's the difference between a false positive and an auto-resolved alert?
A false positive never corresponded to a real problem at all (a monitoring bug, a bad threshold, a flapping check), while an auto-resolved alert reflected a real but transient condition that fixed itself — both are noise from a responder's perspective, but they call for different fixes.
How do I reduce auto-resolved alert volume?
Increase the `for:` duration so transient conditions don't cross the firing threshold, or add a secondary condition requiring sustained severity, so only conditions that would matter to a human actually notify one.
How do I reduce false positives specifically?
Audit alert rules against actual incident postmortems — if an alert rule has fired many times with zero corresponding incidents, either its threshold is miscalibrated or it's not actually measuring something that matters.