Last Tuesday the checkout API returned 500s for four hours — overnight. Nobody noticed until customers complained in the morning. The system has no visibility: no metrics, no alerts. Add the observability layer that detects the next incident before users do.
Metrics tell you THAT something is wrong (error rate up, latency up); alerts make sure a human finds out without staring at graphs. The collector scrapes or receives numeric series from services; the alert manager turns threshold breaches into pages. The cost is maintaining thresholds that balance sensitivity against alert fatigue. This pairing is the minimum bar for production readiness — without it, your users are your monitoring system.
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