SAAFE - A Prioritized Alerting Model to Troubleshoot Your Incidents

Learn about the SAAFE alerting model, a prioritized approach to incident troubleshooting that categorizes alerts based on their system implications rather than data types. Discover how this framework moves beyond traditional taxonomies like the Four Golden Signals, RED, and USE Method by focusing on five key categories: Saturation, Amend, Anomaly, Failure, and Error. Explore Grafana Labs' implementation of a scalable, automated alerting system that uses domain knowledge to analyze data and categorize alerts according to the SAAFE model. Understand how alerts are scored and ranked using severity levels, instance counts, and firing duration to help on-call engineers prioritize, filter, and infer causality during incident response. Examine real-world examples demonstrating the practical benefits of this methodology and learn about the open-source framework built with PromQL and Grafana that you can implement in your own environment.