One incident should not be forty alerts
Ungrouped alerts arrive as separate tickets, so each analyst sees a fragment. The relationship between them is usually the finding.
Alerts are generated per event. Incidents happen per story. Nothing connects those two things unless you build it.
So a single intrusion arrives as separate tickets, distributed across whoever is on shift, each one holding a fragment of a shape nobody can see. Every analyst does their job properly. Every ticket gets a defensible close. The intrusion continues.
The information that would have changed the outcome was never inside any of the alerts. It was in the fact that they arrived together, on related assets, in a short window.
Grouping is the fix and it is mostly unglamorous plumbing. Cluster by entity, usually host or account, inside a time window, and present the cluster rather than the members. An analyst opening one thing that says four alerts, three hosts, eleven minutes is doing a different job from four analysts each opening one line.
There is a second benefit that shows up in your metrics. Alert counts stop being a measure of how busy the team is and start being a measure of how noisy the estate is, which are different problems with different owners.
Look at your last real incident and count how many separate alerts it produced. Then ask whether anybody saw them next to each other before the third one.
CHECK YOURSELF
Three low-severity alerts fire on three different hosts within ten minutes. Each is triaged separately and closed as routine. What was missed?
SHOW THE ANSWER
The relationship between them, which is what made them worth looking at
Why. Each assessment can be individually correct and the outcome still wrong, because the thing that mattered was not in any single alert. Three hosts and ten minutes is a pattern; one host on its own is a Tuesday. Raising severity would have moved three unrelated-looking tickets up a queue without connecting them, and isolating on that evidence would be a guess. Grouping is what turns three fragments into something a person can reason about.