A method and system for generating a job alert. According to embodiments of the present invention, before a target job is processed, a characteristic of input and output of the target job in at least one stage is determined through analyzing a historical job, and a resource overhead associated with the processing of the target job is calculated based on the characteristic of input and output. Then, an alert for the target job is generated in response to the resource overhead exceeding a predetermined threshold. In such manner, an alert for the target job can be proactively generated before the resource overhead problem occurs, so as to enable an administrator or developer to discover a fault in advance and adopt measures actively to avoid loss and damage to the intermediate results or output data when the target job is processed.