Q: A database outage causes 40 application alerts to page at the same time. How do you reduce the noise without hiding the real incident?

This is a dependency fan-out problem. The database is the likely root cause, while the application alerts are symptoms.

• Group alerts by service, cluster, and incident type so responders receive one grouped notification instead of 40 pages.
• Inhibit downstream alerts when a higher-level dependency alert is firing. For example, if DatabaseUnavailable is active, suppress CheckoutDatabaseErrors pages while still showing them in the incident view.
• Keep severity meaningful: Page for the root cause and major user impact; send dependent symptoms to chat or the incident timeline.

I would use Alertmanager or the equivalent alerting tool to: The goal is not to delete signal. It is to present one clear incident with supporting context.

• Add dependency labels: Include labels such as dependency="postgres" so routing and inhibition rules can be precise.