It’s 3am and you’ve just been dreaming about something great then poof: the phone rings. You’re on call this week and something seems to’ve gone awry. Welcome to a critical point in running modern computer systems.

The alerts that hound us are rarely designed to help us and they create a lot of stress and angst. We often ignore alerts, relegating them to empty mailing lists or unread Slack channels.

In this talk we’ll discuss the CASE Method: A vendor neutral, software-free process that works for one person or a whole company. It’s about improving context, keeping attention focused, and learning from our changes. Let’s make alerting better for humans!

Cory Watson is Director of Technology, Office of the CTO at SignalFx, leading high impact, customer-focused projects around observability and monitoring. Cory started his journey to observability as