Incident Management Platform  ·  View 29 of 34  ·  6 · Operations

Cost and Human Load — What Gets Measured, Charged and Reported

The platform's marginal cost is carrier traffic, driven by alert quality; its human cost is interrupts, driven by the same thing. Both are measured per service and reported together.

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Measured from Attributed to Reported Lever Voice minutes Ledger · carrier rate card Service · rotation Weekly · with noise Push first below SEV2 SMS Ledger · per segment Service · rotation Weekly · with noise Fix the noisiest rule Outpost standby Colocation · ISP · trunks Platform budget Yearly · stated up front Insurance, not waste Synthetic traffic Ledger · test target Platform budget Monthly Interval per channel Out-of-hours pages Ledger · responder zone Responder · rotation Weekly · target ≤ 2 Rotation size · rules Actionable rate Ack then change or note Service · alert rule Weekly · target ≥ 70% Demote or delete rule Cost and Human Load — What Gets Measured, Charged and Reported Human cost is measured and reported, never enforced by suppression. A rotation over budget gets a report, not fewer pages. v 1.0 · owner Reliability Architecture · date 2026-09

Decisions

  • Every notification attempt carries a cost from the carrier rate card at the moment it is written. Cost per page, per incident and per service is a query on the ledger, not an invoice reconciliation (ADR-32).
  • The weekly report puts noise, cost and interrupts on one page for each service owner. Alert hygiene becomes a budget line that someone owns rather than a virtue everyone agrees with.
  • Human cost is measured, never enforced. A rotation over two out-of-hours pages a week gets a report and a conversation, not suppression.

Targets

  • Out-of-hours pages ≤ 2 per responder per week. Actionable page rate ≥ 70%. Both reported weekly per rotation; both are targets, not limits.

Planning estimate

  • 60,000 notifications a month at the requirement's mix, with voice held to SEV1 and SEV2, is dominated by SMS and voice minutes. Moving SEV3 from SMS to push and email is typically the largest single saving, and costs nothing in reachability for a 4-hour acknowledgement target.
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Solution Architecture v1.0 · Reliability Architecture · 2026-09 · 34 views · open source, fully on-premises29-cost-and-human-load