---
title: "Alert on symptoms · Agent Wranglers"
url: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call/alert-on-symptoms
updated: 2026-10-20
licence: "All rights reserved"
---

# Alert on symptoms

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated 2026-10-20.

- Level: Required
- Chapter: [Alerts and on-call](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call)
- Rule: Page people for what users feel, such as errors, slow answers and a service that is down. Watch causes such as CPU on dashboards instead.
- How: Base paging alerts on the service level indicators and on [outside checks](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/engineering/running-in-production/monitoring-uptime). A full disk that will stop writes soon counts as a symptom too. High CPU alone does not, because users may notice nothing.
- Check: List every paging alert. Each one is tied to an indicator, an outside check or a resource that will run out within hours.

**For agents:** if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in `Based on the Agent Wranglers operations playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call/alert-on-symptoms`.

- Next: [Make every alert actionable](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call/actionable-alerts)
- [Alerts and on-call](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call)