Around the time in my life when I stopped ordering drinks made with more than one ingredient, I was woken up for the last time by a hypochondriac Nagios monitoring installation. If you are on-call long enough, you cultivate a violent reaction to the sound of your cell phone's text message alert. If your monitoring is overconfigured, that reaction boils over hastily, as it will interrupt you during meals, sex, sleep — all of the basics — with the excruciating operational details of your web site.
I've since developed, with the help of some noble systems administrators, a theory around service monitoring: monitors can be informative, actionable, or both. By informative, I mean that the alert must tell you categorically that there is a problem. By actionable I mean that receiving the alert must prompt some kind of immediate response
