I have two independent alert notification systems for my servers. The server is a virtual machine on Linode and one of the alerts comes from Linode. The other monitoring system we use is New Relic. They are both watching out for IO utilization.

Every night I get alerts from both of them as the server is using too much IO. I run quite a few tasks in the middle of the night but the one I confirmed that can cause IO-warnings is running the backups. The backup is done by s3cmd sync. I tried ionice but it still generates the warnings.

Getting warnings every night reduces the efficacy of warnings when they happen for real. For Linode I could raise the level at which a warning is issued, but it might mean making the whole thing useless as the level is too high.

What would be the proper solution for this?