Designing alert cooldowns that don't cry wolf

The fastest way to make an alerting system useless is to make it noisy. Once a channel is muted, it might as well not exist. So the default has to be: tell me about new and meaningfully-worse things, and nothing else.

New issue vs. known issue

A brand-new issue is almost always worth a ping. The hundredth occurrence of a known issue, this minute, is not. Marsad separates the two: new issues alert immediately, while existing ones only re-alert on a real change in rate.

Cooldowns, per rule

Every alert rule has a cooldown. After it fires, it stays quiet for a configurable window even if the condition holds — so a sustained spike is one notification, not a thousand. You can route by severity to Slack, email, a webhook, or straight into Linear as a task.

The goal is simple: when Marsad pings you, you look.