What is the definition of an Alert?

An error message displayed to an application user is a user-facing application notification, not the ITIL-defined Alert concept which is generated by monitoring infrastructure and directed at IT operations.

The ITIL definition of an Alert is a notification warning that a threshold has been reached, that something has changed, or that a failure has occurred. Alerts are generated by monitoring tools or Configuration Items and are processed by the Event Management process, which determines the appropriate response such as logging, escalation, or incident creation.

An Alert is not classified as a type of Incident - while an Alert can trigger the creation of an Incident, they are distinct concepts defined separately in the ITIL Event Management and Incident Management processes.

An audit report identifying non-compliance with procedures is a management reporting artifact, not an Alert, which is a real-time or near-real-time event-driven notification from monitoring systems.