Being on call is an essential part of operating reliable distributed systems, but it comes with real human costs such as alert fatigue, sudden wakeups in the middle of the night, and the ongoing anxiety of what the next notification might bring. Many engineers know the feeling: Your phone lights up, a sound cuts through the silence, and your heart rate spikes before you’re even fully awake.
At Datadog, we wanted to rethink what an on-call alert should sound like. Notification sounds directly impact an engineer’s quality of life because the sensory experience of the sound can play a role in causing psychological and physical burnout. This realization led us to redesign our sound library for Datadog On-Call in the Datadog mobile app by using a principle we consider essential: empathy for the responder behind the pager.
In this post, we’ll share how we approached building notification sounds that prioritize engineer well-being, the research that guided us, and the design decisions that shaped the final experience.
Why on-call sounds matter
On-call alerts often indicate issues that need immediate attention. When something breaks, the alert is usually the first signal an engineer receives. Poorly designed alerts not only increase annoyance and cognitive load, but they also can increase the risk of missed critical issues. In contrast, thoughtfully designed alerts preserve urgency without adding unnecessary stress, helping ensure that the right signals are seen and acted on.
