Why People Shouldn't Be
Your Alerting System
People are good at judgement. They are bad at being the first line of machine detection.
When teams rely on people to notice failures, they build inconsistency into operations. Someone has to remember to check a dashboard, inspect a queue, open a report, or ask whether a job finished. That works only until the responsible person is busy, asleep, or unaware that the process mattered today.
Human alerting also changes the emotional cost of incidents. People feel responsible for not seeing what the system never surfaced clearly. That is a design failure, not a personal failure.
Let people interpret, not patrol
Telemetry should move routine detection into the system. OpenTrace gives background work a way to report status and expose gaps in activity. People can then spend attention on interpretation and response instead of patrol.