Three-quarters (75%) of UK IT teams say they’ve experienced outages as a result of missing alerts in 2025, pinpointing fatigue as a key driver of the trend.
That’s according to Splunk’s global State of Observability 2025 report, which surveyed 1,855 ITOps and engineering professionals, including 300 in the UK, and reveals that alert fatigue is fast becoming one of the most pressing challenges to operational resilience.
Alert fatigue is particularly pronounced in the UK, where over half (54%) of respondents say false alerts are harming morale, and 15% admit to ignoring or suppressing alerts — higher than the global average (13%).
UK IT teams point to tool sprawl (61%), false alerts (54%), and the overall volume of alerts (34%) as some of the greatest contributors to their stress. These pressure points suggest growing frustration within IT departments, where constant interruptions are taking a toll and creating an environment where critical security alerts could be missed.
A lack of clear ownership in incident response also appears to be compounding the issue. Just 21% of respondents say they regularly isolate incidents to a specific team — a key marker of maturity in incident response — while 36% admit they rarely isolate them. This ambiguity increases the risk that important security alerts are left unaddressed, leaving organisations more vulnerable to attacks and exposing them to avoidable breaches and downtime.
By bridging silos across teams and strengthening observability practices, organisations can help boost resilience while protecting both their systems and their people.
The research also shows that when observability and security teams work more closely together, ownership is better-defined and fewer alerts are missed. In fact, 64% of global respondents report that stronger collaboration between these functions reduces customer-impacting incidents. Better collaboration across teams, paired with more mature observability practices, can significantly increase operational resilience while reducing threats to platforms and the people supporting them.
Petra Jenner, SVP & General Manager, EMEA, at Splunk, said: “IT teams are drowning in noise. Every day they’re hit with alerts, but without the right context or ownership, it’s almost impossible to know which ones really matter. This lack of clarity puts a lot of pressure on teams and slows response times.
“When critical alerts get lost in that noise, organisations risk downtime and customer disruption, which can quickly translate into revenue loss and lasting reputational damage.
“To build resilience and combat alert fatigue, organisations need to consider the psychological wellbeing of their IT staff and ensure the tools they use genuinely support them. This means observability tools that accurately triage alerts, understand context, suggest clear remediation paths, and reduce the number of interfaces already-stressed teams are required to work with. With the right systems in place, alongside better cross-departmental co-ordination, teams can act quickly, with confidence and avoid the pitfalls of alert fatigue.”
Photo by Blackcreek Corporate on Unsplash
