Signal-to-Page Compression Ratio

Signal-to-Page Compression Ratio is the ratio between the raw health signals an agency ingests (status page polls, metric thresholds, queue depth, CVE feeds) and the number of pages that actually reach a human on call. Most agencies expand the numerator without touching the denominator: adding vendors to a status aggregator, wiring more Slack channels, forwarding every digest. The ratio collapses, and the ops team learns to swipe alerts away. The discipline is to treat page volume as a fixed budget and force every new signal through a compression step (deduplication, correlation, severity gating) before it earns a page. A practical illustration: OutageDeck re-reads 172+ vendor status feeds roughly every 10 minutes, which is only useful if a downstream rule decides which of those state changes deserve a 3am wake-up versus a line in tomorrow's digest. Agencies selling monitoring as a retainer should publish the ratio to clients: it is the difference between a risk shield and noise.