Real-Time Alerting Checklist for Small Teams
Small teams do not fail because they lack tools. They fail because alerts are noisy, duplicated, and routed to the wrong channel.
Checklist
- Coverage: Do you have feeds for every mission-critical source?
- Thresholds: Are your watches sensitive enough for early warning?
- Dedupe: Are true copies suppressed while fresh updates still pass?
- Verification: Is there a quality gate before user-facing notification?
- Channels: Is urgent traffic using push and not only email?
- Escalation: Is there a clear path from watch to investigate to action?
- Review loop: Do you audit misses and false alarms weekly?
Minimum Viable Setup
Start with 3-5 high-impact watches, tune aggressively for signal quality, and only then expand breadth.
Operating rule
If your team ignores alerts for more than a day, reduce noise before adding any new watches.
Suggested Starter Watches
- Market shock watch (crypto or macro threshold).
- Cloud outage watch (provider-level disruption).
- Cyber incident watch (ransomware/data breach chatter).
- Leadership risk watch (executive exit rumors).