Cardinality Cloud

Observability Practitioner Series

SRE and Observability field guides written by Jack Neely, not a vendor. 25 years of runtime experience at Fortune 500 scale.

The SRE On-Call Review Practice book cover
BOOK 1 AVAILABLE NOW

The SRE On-Call Review Practice

A practical framework for combating alert fatigue and rebuilding on-call trust.

More than 10 pages a week? The fix isn't a better tool. It's a better practice.

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  • Audit your alerts. Turn down the 3 AM noise with a structured, repeatable practice grounded in Google SRE principles.
  • Eliminate alert ambiguity. Every firing alert gets exactly one of three valid responses: action it, fix the rule, or escalate it. Nothing rots in an unresolved pile.
  • Fight burnout. Name and mitigate the real cognitive costs: Phantom Vibration Syndrome, attention residue, decision fatigue.
  • Prove it's improving. Measure your alert load and on-call health week over week, and make the case to leadership with real trends.
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From Book 1

The Thing That Almost Broke Me

There was a knock at my door. I started screaming before I knew what or who it was. I scared my friend. I scared myself. That's when I knew I needed a therapist.

Alert fatigue is the slow erosion of trust: first in the pager, then in the metrics, then in the idea that any situation is safe. I've watched it break teams the same way, over and over, and it broke me too. This book is the technique I developed with Fortune 500 companies, companies you've heard of, to fix their pager. It audits your alerts, kills the noise, and rebuilds the on-call trust your team has quietly lost.

INSIDE THE BOOK

There's a clinical name for what on-call engineers develop. Odds are you have it. Almost no one knows it.

Phantom Vibration Syndrome is feeling your phone buzz when there's no notification there. A tactile hallucination. First documented in pager users, who called it beepilepsy. A 2010 study found 68% of medical residents experienced it, and the rate rises with exposure, climbing toward 96% by an intern's third month. It correlates with occupational burnout specifically, not generalized anxiety.

The pager is training your nervous system. This is a warning sign, not a curiosity.

The foundation of any reliable system is the sustained health and well-being of the people who build it.

I've believed that for a long time, and Book 1 says it plainly. There is no business imperative, no uptime SLA, no customer escalation that supersedes it. When leadership treats this as a soft concern rather than an operational one, the system eventually makes the case for them, usually at the worst possible moment.

UNDER RESEARCH

Where the Series Goes Next

Book 1 tackles on-call. The series continues into the foundations underneath it. Topics under active research:

Telemetry Signals Beneath the Vendor Toolchain

What logs, metrics, traces, and events actually are, defined beneath any vendor's toolchain, and the craft of using each one well.

The 5th Golden Signal: Customer Happiness

Google swears there are four golden signals. They miscounted. The fifth is the one you can't instrument, only infer from the four they did count. So, did Google lie to us, or just stop counting too soon?

Observability Maturity Without Vendor Scorecards

Measuring where a team actually stands without a vendor grading its own homework.

No titles or dates yet, and that's deliberate.

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From the author

I'd Love Your Feedback

If you've read the book, or you're deep in the problems this series covers, tell me what landed and what didn't. Corrections get fixed in future editions, and reader feedback shapes what gets researched next.

I keep a few office-hours slots open each month. Not a sales call. Just two engineers talking through a hard problem.

Book Office Hours

Or just email jjneely@cardinality.cloud. I read every reply.