Why alerts, not dashboards, are the foundation of effective infrastructure monitoring

Summary

This article argues that alerts, not dashboards, are the true core of infrastructure monitoring. While teams often focus on building dashboards as the primary output of their monitoring work, the author contends that dashboards are passive and rarely actively watched. Instead, alerts provide the actionable, real-time notifications that actually drive incident response and system reliability. The article critiques other monitoring platforms for treating alerts as an afterthought and advocates for building alert-driven monitoring systems that teams can genuinely trust.