Monica Rathbun implores us to understand where we’re sending our alerts:
Today I ran into something on a client server I unfortunately see too often. The DBA goes through the trouble of configuring and setting up alerts\operators but doesn’t really understand what the options in the configurations mean. So unfortunately, that means they take the CYA (cover your ass) approach and they check all of them. Now, not only have I seen this with alerts but also with things like security configurations as well. My advice is to always in to take a second and research what each option is before you check the little boxes, especially when it comes to security. Always follow the rule of less is more.
In the example below the administrator enabled alerts for an operator using the CYA approach. They checked email, pager, and netsend.
The E-mail option is probably the only interesting one anymore; if you need paging, integrating with something like Pagerduty (or one of its competitors) is the better call nowadays.