To prevent staff burnout due to frequent alerts from unhealthy systems, what should be prioritized?

Prioritizing the elimination of unactionable alerts is crucial in mitigating staff burnout, as it directly addresses the noise created by excessive notifications that do not require immediate response or action. When teams are bombarded with alerts that do not provide clear insights or actionable steps, it leads to alert fatigue. This not only overwhelms engineers but can also cause important alerts to be ignored or overlooked due to the sheer volume of notifications.

By focusing on filtering out alerts that do not lead to meaningful actions—such as those that are informational rather than operational—organizations can streamline their monitoring processes. This helps ensure that when an alert does come through, it is likely to be a relevant issue that requires attention, thus improving response times and maintaining the effectiveness of the engineering team without causing burnout from constant distractions.

The other choices, while relevant to incident management and response strategies, do not directly tackle the core issue of alert fatigue as effectively. Creating incident reports and distributing alerts across time zones may help with workload management and collaboration but doesn't lessen the volume of alerts themselves. Redefining Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for error budgets can be beneficial for long-term resilience and planning but does not necessarily reduce the immediate stress from frequent alerts.