While high-frequency alerting is sometimes justified for production SLAs, it's often overused across non-critical alerts or replicated blindly across environments. Projects with multiple environments (e.g., dev, QA, staging, prod) often duplicate alert rules without adjusting for business impact, which can lead to alert sprawl and inflated monitoring costs.
In large-scale environments, reducing the frequency of non-critical alerts—especially in lower environments—can yield significant savings. Teams often overlook this lever because alert configuration is considered part of operational hygiene rather than cost control. Tuning alert frequencies based on SLA requirements and actual urgency is a low-friction optimization opportunity that does not compromise observability when implemented thoughtfully.
Azure Monitor Alerts are billed based on the number of alert rules and the frequency of evaluation. Alert rules with higher evaluation frequencies generate more evaluation requests per month, directly impacting costs. Metric alerts are charged per rule and evaluation, while log search alerts are billed based on query frequency and data volume processed. For example, Alert rules with a 1-minute evaluation frequency are significantly more expensive than those set to 5, or 15-minute intervals.
These costs scale linearly with the number of rules and environments. For example, a 1-minute frequency can cost over 5x more than a 15-minute interval, making frequency configuration a key cost lever, especially in environments with hundreds or thousands of alerts.
