Don't over automate
Learned this lesson the hard way. Had a "clever" monitoring script that would restart any service missing heartbeats for 60 seconds. Seemed bulletproof—until it wasn't.
- Learned this lesson the hard way. Had a "clever" monitoring script that would restart any service missing heartbeats for 60 seconds. Seemed bulletproof—until it wasn't. Turns out our services needed 90-120 seconds to warm up after deploys. The monitoring script kept killing them mid-startup, triggering more restarts, creating a death spiral. We'd automated ourselves into brittleness. Sometimes we get so trigger-happy with automation we forget some systems just need a minute to get their stuff together. Lesson learned the hard way: *Know which services need startup grace periods. *Watch what they actually DO during initialization. *Sometimes the best automation is knowing when NOT to automate. Our monitoring should understand context, not just react to signals. A warming-up service isn't broken—it's doing exactly what it should. https://uptimelabs.io/resilience-vs-robustness/