Three in four UK IT teams suffered disruptions in 2025 due to missed critical alerts. This highlights the risks not only of the poor configurations that caused these outages, but also of what is known as alarm fatigue.
A new report from Splunk shows that misconfigured alerts lead to more than half (54%) of respondents agreeing that incorrect alerts impact morale. As a result, UK IT teams are also more likely to ignore alerts (15% compared to 13% globally).
The report adds that tool proliferation (61%) causes more stress and missed alerts than false alerts (54%) and alert volume (34%), showing that a properly configured environment could actually prevent many missed alerts.
Missed and false alerts are a major problem for IT teams
Common associated consequences include increased risk of downtime or breaches, disruption to customer relationships, loss of revenue, reputational damage, and IT staff burnout.
“(A) Lack of clarity puts a lot of pressure on teams and slows down response times,” said Petra Jenner, senior vice president and general manager, EMEA.
Splunk’s recommendations are that organizations should implement more robust observability tools that add richer context and suggest paths for remediation. The company is also calling for massive simplification by reducing the number of tools and interfaces IT teams have to deal with.
But the report also highlights the importance of taking care of the IT teams responsible for monitoring outages and resolving downtime: Improving coordination and ownership between teams is critical. “To build resilience and combat alert fatigue, organizations must consider the mental well-being of their IT workforce,” Jenner added.
This has already been demonstrated: two-thirds (64%) of respondents worldwide agree that better collaboration between observability and security teams reduces customer-related incidents.
“With the right systems in place and better coordination between departments, teams can act quickly and confidently and avoid the dangers of alert fatigue,” Jenner concluded.
