One Failure Is Not an Incident
Alert thresholds exist for a reason. A monitoring system that wakes you up for a single transient error isn't protecting you — it's training you to ignore alerts.
Observability
Telemetry Without the SDK
OpenTelemetry SDKs bring a lot of weight. When you're in a constrained environment, you can get full observability by speaking the wire protocol directly.
Healthy Process, Empty Pipe
A system can run without errors and produce nothing at all. Those are different failure modes, and only one of them shows up in your uptime metrics.
The Log Nobody Reads
Why writing logs matters even when nobody checks them