Alt-text on image: A digital cybersecurity warning symbol with red binary code, representing a critical cyber threat, data breach, or security alert in a network system.

Alerts get missed. All the time.

Your vendors are covering themselves by alerting on everything—every small issue, every potential risk. The result? Thousands of alerts flooding your team daily.

It doesn’t take long before your team stops paying attention. And when a real, critical alert comes in? They miss it.

So, what can you do?

Tours of Duty: The Fix for Alert Fatigue and Weak Documentation

We use tours of duty to solve this problem.

Tours of duty keep your engineers sharp, improve documentation, and make your MSP resilient to turnover.

How It Works

Every 90 days, each security team member rotates into a new role.

Examples:

  • Backup Tickets – Managing and resolving backup failures
  • Maintenance & Patching – Ensuring updates are applied
  • SIEM Alerts & Security Monitoring – Watching for actual threats
  • Ticket Response – Handling user issues
  • Project Work – Working on long-term initiatives
  • Long Ticket Work – Tackling the toughest, most time-consuming issues

At the start of a tour, engineers rely on existing documentation—and are expected to update it as they go. The person who just completed that tour is their go-to resource.

Why does this work? Because no one wants to ask for help more than once. If the documentation is bad, they fix it. If the process is broken, they question it.

By week four, they hit their stride. By week ten, they are looking at the next role with fresh eyes and improving the next process. 

Then? They switch. 

Why It Works 

  1. It eliminates alert fatigue. Seeing the same security alert for two years straight? That’s how threats get ignored. Fresh eyes catch real issues.
  2. It keeps documentation strong. Every 90 days, someone new looks at the process and improves it.
  3. It builds a cross-trained team. No single person becomes the only one who knows how a system works. If someone leaves or takes time off, your MSP doesn’t grind to a halt.

This Transformed My MSP

When I ran my MSP, this system changed everything. We use it today at Galactic to keep our team sharp, our documentation tight, and our security team on their toes.

The biggest surprise? The questions that come up actually make the systems better.

“Why are we doing it this way?”

“What if we changed this process?”

That’s how you evolve. That’s how you improve. That’s how you stop missing critical security alerts.

If you’re dealing with alert fatigue, weak documentation, or a team that feels stuck in their roles, it’s time to implement tours of duty.

It worked for us. It will work for you.