Your monitoring emails you when the site goes down at 3am. You're asleep. The email is useless.
Three things most setups get wrong:
A silent phone shows an SMS but doesn't ring. A voice call rings — and repeated calls can break through Do Not Disturb.
One unanswered call isn't "handled." The alert needs to escalate — call again, call someone else — until a human acknowledges.
Untested alerting is a guess. Trigger a real alert, ignore it on purpose, watch it climb.
