Imagine it’s 3 AM and you’re on call for a critical tunnel or bridge project. Suddenly dozens of alarms light up your phone from separate monitoring systems – a tilt sensor on the bridge, a crack gauge on the dam, a groundwater piezometer, and an inclinometer report, each from a different dashboard. Most alerts turn out to be normal variations or duplicates, but you have to sift through them to find the single critical one. This is alert fatigue: the mental and operational exhaustion from too many low-priority alerts. In large infrastructure and SHM deployments, poorly coordinated alarms can overwhelm engineers, causing delays or missed warnings of real danger.
Alert fatigue in this context means operators become desensitized or distrust the alarms because the noise of redundant or irrelevant alerts drowns out real issues It occurs when many sensors and tools each issue independent thresholds and notifications, so an exceedance in one system triggers multiple identical alerts. With fragmented monitoring setups, there is “too many tools, too little integration.” In practice, long shifts and high stress amplify the problem: like clinicians ignoring repeated alarms, engineers can start tuning out alerts altogether. The danger is missing a critical structural warning.
Why Does Fragmentation Breed Fatigue?
In most large projects, monitoring is fragmented by discipline. Geotechnical crews use instruments (inclinometers and piezometers) and their own software; structural teams rely on strain gauges and accelerometers tied to another system; surveying groups use total-station or GNSS data in a third interface. Each vendor or team sets its own alarm thresholds and sends email/SMS separately. These uncoordinated streams overlap and duplicate signals. For example, two adjacent tiltmeters might trigger alerts independently for the same ground shift, producing two or three alarms for one event. Without a single overview, operators must check multiple logs and interpret conflicting messages.
This lack of integration means redundant alerts and no single “source of truth.” The IBM Think article on alert fatigue warns that common causes include “unfiltered telemetry and redundancy” and “too many tools, too little integration.” In infrastructure work, one site might even have overlapping instrumentation (e.g., a strain gauge and an accelerometer both detecting the same vibration), with each firing its own alarm. The result is often a deluge of low-priority notifications. Over time, teams lose trust in the system and stop reacting promptly. This was seen in other fields (e.g. healthcare and cybersecurity), where thousands of daily alerts led to missed critical events. In SHM, the stakes are similar—bridges and tunnels will be repeatedly probed for movement by numerous sensors, and without coordination the signal-to-noise ratio plummets.
Read more: Why Is Fragmented Data Killing Your Productivity (and How to Unify It)?
Unified Monitoring to the Rescue
A unified monitoring platform changes this picture. Instead of siloed tools, all sensor data—structural, geotechnical, and geospatial—feed into one system. Here alerts can be correlated and deduplicated across sources and assigned consistent priority. Engineers get one consolidated view, not ten separate dashboards. For example, in Saudi Arabia’s NEOM tunnel project, a unified data management system integrated instrumentation (GSMDMS) and tunnel data management (TDMS) on a single platform, enabling real-time alerts and analysis. Rather than setting separate alarms for each sensor string, the system evaluated them together: it could flag a converging tunnel as a unified incident and trigger one action plan. This approach reduced duplicate notifications and gave operators one clear alarm instead of many.
A unified platform also synchronizes subsurface, structural, and geospatial data. If a geotechnical instrument detects settlement underground, the system can instantly check GPS and total-station surveys on the structure above, recognizing a single event. This multidisciplinary correlation greatly reduces noise. LogicMonitor describes alert correlation as “grouping alerts into a single unified incident” and providing relationships between alerts from various sources. When one incident causes multiple sensors to trigger, a good platform groups them so operators see one issue.
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Best Practices to Reduce Alert Fatigue
Even with unified monitoring, teams must tune alerts carefully. Key practices include:
- Threshold alignment and normalization. Review and calibrate alarm levels across sensors measuring related phenomena. For example, set soil-pressure and inclinometer thresholds so they trigger together only under significant movement, not noise. Avoid multiple alerts for trivial variations. Regular review (e.g., quarterly) prevents slow drifts from multiplying false alarms.
- Tiered alerting (multi-level thresholds). Rather than binary “alert/no-alert,” use warning/critical tiers. For example, an excavation tiltmeter might issue a “Warning” at 75% of the design limit and a “Critical” if reaching 100%. Prioritizing by severity helps focus teams on imminent danger first. Tiered thresholds ensure that minor fluctuations only produce low-priority notices, so engineers aren’t woken up for every small blip.
- Automated alert correlation and deduplication. Configure the platform to group simultaneous alarms from the same zone or cause. Many modern systems support rule-based correlation: e.g., "If A and B exceed thresholds within X minutes, create one incident." As Radiant Security notes, “automated correlation and triage” analyzes events from various sources to find patterns and connections. This technique treats related alerts like clues in one investigation. Platforms can use time or geospatial proximity to bundle alerts—so if multiple settlement prisms move together, they form one alert group.
- Contextual dashboards and geospatial mapping. Provide a unified map or 3D model that shows sensor alarms in context. For instance, a map of the Anji Khad Bridge site (below) overlays alert icons on the bridge image. This helps engineers instantly see if multiple notifications cluster at one location. In a single view, operators can distinguish a broad landslide (many sensors) from a local effect. Contextual data (e.g., timestamp, camera photo, geology layer) attached to each alert also helps triage issues faster.
- Notification grouping and escalation policies. Set rules so that repeated or closely timed alerts are batched. For example, some tools let you group notifications by sensor cluster or by time window. If a tunnel has 10 instruments, you might get one aggregated alert per sensor type instead of ten separate emails. Similarly, design escalation chains: minor alerts inform on-duty staff, and critical ones page senior engineers immediately.
- Continuous review and suppression windows. Use techniques like “flapping detection” (suppression of rapid on/off alerts) and schedule maintenance downtimes for known boring activities (e.g. drilling). As Datadog advises, increase evaluation windows so alerts fire only if a condition persists. Also, regularly audit alerts: retire or adjust any that turn out to be false positives or always-on warnings. This keeps the system lean.
By applying these steps on an integrated platform, alert volume can be dramatically cut without removing genuine warnings. The goal is smarter alerts, not fewer—ensuring every alarm adds value.
The result is faster response, higher confidence, and ultimately safer, more resilient infrastructure. In the end, smarter alerts (not simply fewer alerts) are the key to maintaining vigilance without burning out the teams entrusted with our bridges, tunnels, and other vital assets.
1. What causes alert fatigue in infrastructure monitoring?
Alert fatigue arises when monitoring systems generate too many alerts, especially from uncoordinated sensors or duplicated thresholds. Many of these alarms may be low-priority, false positives or redundant. In other words, too much “noise” from multiple tools or unfiltered telemetry causes engineers to become desensitized to warnings. Fragmented toolsets and poor prioritization exacerbate the problem.
2. How does integration reduce duplicate alarms?
A unified platform merges data streams so that related alerts are seen as one incident. Integration allows the system to deduplicate events: if two sensors detect the same shift, the platform groups them into a single alert. As one industry source notes, moving to an integrated system “eliminates duplicate alerts and streamlines workflows.” In practice, this means instead of receiving ten messages for one event, engineers get one consolidated notification (with all relevant sensor details), which greatly eases response.
3. What platform features help reduce alert fatigue?
Key features include built-in alert correlation engines, customizable severity tiers, and flexible notification grouping. Modern monitoring platforms offer correlation logic that automatically clusters similar alerts and the ability to set warning vs. critical thresholds (tiered alerts). They also provide visual dashboards and maps to give context to alarms. Features like rolling suppressions, flapping detection, and downtime scheduling further suppress non-actionable alerts. Together, these tools focus attention on the alerts that truly matter.
4. How do correlated alerts improve decision-making?
Correlation shows the big picture behind multiple signals. By grouping related alarms into a single “insight,” operators see the relationships between sensor readings.