A person woken at three in the morning should not be searching a wiki, and an alert without a runbook link is a decision deferred to somebody asleep.
annotations:
summary: '{{ $value | humanizePercentage }} of checkouts failing'
runbook: 'https://wiki/runbooks/checkout-failing'
dashboard: 'https://grafana/d/checkout'
# and the CI check that the link resolves, because a
# runbook URL that 404s is worse than none — it costs
# ninety seconds before anybody gives up on it.Validating the links in the pipeline is the part that keeps this true over time, since pages get moved and nobody updates the alert rule. The summary carrying the actual value rather than the alert name is the other half: “8.2% of checkouts failing” is a different response from “0.4% of checkouts failing”, and both fire the same alert. An alert with no runbook is a reasonable signal that the alert is not ready to page anybody.