# Add the alert that would have paged sooner

An alert on the signal that moved first, back-tested against the incident window.

Category: Incident follow-through
Source: https://letsship.ai/use-cases/add-the-alert-that-would-have-paged-sooner
Published: 2026-08-25

## Goal

Add the alert that would have paged before the incident became visible to users.

## Acceptance criteria

- The rule fires when replayed against the incident window
- It does not fire against a comparable healthy window
- It links to a runbook that exists
- The routing destination is a person or rotation, not an unwatched channel

## What lands as proof

The rule replayed against both the incident window and a healthy one, showing it fires for the first and not the second.

## Prompt

Copy this to an agent to open the ticket:

```text
Create a Linear issue in my team and assign it to the SHIP agent.

Title: Add the {signal} alert with its runbook

Description: Add the alert that would have paged before the incident became visible to users.

Acceptance criteria:
- The rule fires when replayed against the incident window
- It does not fire against a comparable healthy window
- It links to a runbook that exists
- The routing destination is a person or rotation, not an unwatched channel

Before you create the issue, look at which metric moved first during the incident and replace {signal} with it.
```

## Questions

### What does the agent actually change?

The ticket is scoped to one outcome: add the alert that would have paged before the incident became visible to users. Work that serves that outcome is in scope, and anything outside it is left for a separate ticket, so the pull request stays reviewable.

### How do I know the work is done?

The pull request carries the evidence, not only the diff. Here that means rule and runbook in the same pull request, so a reviewer can confirm the result without reproducing the work locally.

### How much oversight does this need?

The run stops once the plan is written. Somebody reads the approach and approves it before any code exists, which is the cheapest moment to redirect the work.