Answer
Alerting only reduces downtime when thresholds, ownership, and escalation paths are designed around action. The system has to tell the right person what failed, how urgent it is, and what context matters, otherwise alerts become background chatter that the team learns to ignore.
Buyers should test whether a monitoring platform supports severity, deduplication, acknowledgment, and handoff rules that match real operating procedures. Good alerting is operational design supported by software, not just more notifications.