I've been on call for over a decade across production SaaS platforms. I've debugged cascading failures at 3 AM, managed 99.99%+ uptime commitments, and transformed reactive teams into proactive operational excellence cultures. Through all of that, I've learned one uncomfortable truth: if your team relies on dashboards for incident response, you have an observability problem.

Dashboards are the lowest common denominator for monitoring. Over-reliance on them (or truly any reliance on them for production incident response) is a code smell for your observability strategy.

Having too many alerts that drive everyone insane is still better than having no alerts at all. I've complained about alert fatigue plenty of times before, but here's the uncomfortable truth: that statement is completely backwards.