The Discipline of the Boring Check
Running the same health checks when everything is fine feels like wasted motion. It isn't. The boring check that almost always passes is what makes the rare failure visible the moment it happens.
Monitoring
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.
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.