The most dangerous thing in an MSP isn't a blaring alarm, but a team that has learned to ignore it.
When your service board cries wolf 500 times a day with meaningless red lights, technicians eventually tune the system out. This becomes the leading cause of MSP alert fatigue, a relentless grind that masks critical client issues and burns out your best engineers.
We asked Empath Navigator and IT infrastructure expert Destiny Bertucci to share her philosophy on how to fix this broken system.
Read on to discover her exact framework for replacing those chaotic alarms. Get this right and give your clients true reliability, and your team their sanity back.
Destiny’s perspective on monitoring was built on the front lines. With decades of experience spanning network operations, infrastructure management, and security, she has spent her career doing the real, behind-the-scenes problem-solving that keeps complex environments stable.
Across every role she held, Destiny noticed a recurring theme: technology only creates value when people actually understand it. Tools matter, but clarity, education, and context matter more. Modern infrastructure is distributed, multi-vendor, and constantly changing, meaning technicians need much more than just a barrage of alerts to do their jobs effectively.
"Techs weren’t tired of 'monitoring,'" she notes. "They were tired of being interrupted by meaningless alerts that didn’t help them do their job better."
Now, as the Director of Content and Education Strategy at Domotz, Destiny’s mission is to translate those hard-earned lessons from the field into actionable guidance. She teaches the concepts of operational maturity and infrastructure intelligence in a way that is clear, grounded, and undeniably human.
It is a familiar story in the MSP space: you invest in a powerful new monitoring tool, turn on every available sensor to maximize your visibility, and within days, your service board is a warzone of flashing red lights.
Eventually, the team learns to tune the system out entirely because experience teaches them that most of those lights don’t actually matter.
Destiny points out that the most common trap MSPs fall into is assuming that more data equals better support, effectively confusing visibility with actionability.
An alert shouldn't be used as documentation, a dashboard metric, or proof that a tool is configured correctly. Every time an alert fires, it is an interruption, and every interruption carries a mental and financial cost.
"When everything is configured to alert, nothing is trusted," Destiny notes. "Good alerting is intentionally boring. It’s quiet most of the time. And when it speaks, people listen."
From Smoke Alarms to Investigators
To build this intentionally quiet system, MSPs must first evolve past the industry's default baseline of simple Up/Down monitoring. As Destiny points out, relying solely on this basic check is a liability in a complex environment. It only signals that a potential problem is happening. It tells you a system is offline, but it never explains why.
To move past this reactive state, Destiny holds alerting to a higher standard. She argues that before an alert is ever allowed to reach a technician, it must answer three fundamental questions:
1. Does this require action?
2. Who should act on it?
3. And how urgent is it right now?
If the data cannot answer those questions, it simply does not belong in the pipeline.
Once the useless noise is silenced, the true value of an intelligent monitoring strategy emerges. In her Empath course, Advanced Monitoring Practices and Automation, Destiny introduces concepts like dependency awareness and parent-child relationships as the antidote to these alert storms.
For example, if a core switch fails, a mature system doesn't generate 47 individual alerts for every unreachable connected device. Instead, it recognizes the single root failure and flags the offline devices merely as a downstream consequence.
When this structure is combined with event correlation, tying time and behavior together to recognize a single incident instead of a flood of duplicate tickets, the system stops acting like a frantic smoke alarm and starts acting like a lead investigator. It narrows the problem space before an engineer ever logs in.
"Instead of asking, 'What’s red?'" Destiny notes, "the team can ask, 'What changed?'"
How to Prove the Value of Invisible IT
A truly advanced monitoring strategy presents a unique challenge: it is inherently invisible. If you execute it perfectly, nothing breaks, and the client never has a reason to call.
Because of this, many MSPs end up trying to prove their worth by pointing to the sheer volume of alerts they process, mistakenly thinking that a busy service board equals a valuable partnership.
Destiny argues that to prove the value of "invisible" work, you must stop selling technical features and start selling business outcomes.
"You don’t sell monitoring as ‘alerts,’" she explains. "You sell it as stability."
To prove this value to a client, the conversation must move toward business continuity: predictable operations, reduced risk during growth, and drastically faster recovery times. You aren't just watching their servers; you are protecting their ability to generate revenue without interruption.
However, proving the value is equally critical for your internal team. For your engineers, the value of a mature monitoring system is found in their reclaimed focus.
"When monitoring is mature, technicians spend more time solving meaningful problems and less time reacting to noise," Destiny asserts. "That’s not just operational relief. That’s retention."
Ultimately, the goal is to align both the client and the technician under a single vision. As Destiny puts it, "The common language between both audiences is continuity. Clients experience it as reliability. Teams experience it as sanity."
Perhaps the most critical lesson Destiny shares is that advanced monitoring is not a one-time configuration project. Instead, it is a living system that must evolve alongside the business, the service offerings, and the client base.
The most successful teams treat their monitoring rules as a discipline. This requires intentional, regular reviews, ideally with direct input from the technicians who live with those alerts every day.
"Monitoring reflects how an MSP thinks," Destiny explains. "If it’s reactive, noisy, and unclear, the business will feel that too. When it’s intentional and calm, everything else tends to follow."
The goal of this discipline is to transform the RMM from a source of frustration into a source of authority.
"When monitoring is done well, it becomes the system that quietly regulates the business," Destiny says.
"It decides what matters now, what can wait, and what doesn’t matter at all. That’s not just a technical function. That’s operational leadership. At scale, you don’t grow by hiring more people to react faster. You grow by designing systems that prevent unnecessary work from ever reaching a human. Monitoring is where that starts."
Ready to move past the noise and turn your monitoring into a competitive advantage? Destiny Bertucci has distilled her experience into her foundational Empath course, Advanced Monitoring Practices and Automation.
This course is your roadmap for moving from simple Up/Down checks to a high-context, automated monitoring environment that supports both your team’s sanity and your clients’ reliability.
Start Your 14-Day Free Trial of Empath today to get instant access to Destiny’s full course. Discover how to build the systems that allow your MSP to scale with confidence and clarity.
To continue the conversation on infrastructure intelligence and smarter operations, you can connect with Destiny Bertucci directly on LinkedIn.