1. When your DBMS is no longer responding to queries, your boss and your customers replace your monitoring system (unlimited free phone calls 24/7 included ;).

1. When your DBMS is no longer responding to queries, your boss and your customers replace your monitoring system (unlimited free phone calls 24/7 included ;). Case in point: HN is often a better place to check than Google Cloud status page, for example. 2. Maybe you didn't get it, but "nullmailer not forwarding cron email due to mailgun problems" was a bit too specific to be an example I just made up, wasn't it? Again, the premise "if your monitoring is working correctly" is not a good one to base your reasoning upon. Especially if you have 1 VM (VPS) and not a whole k8s cluster with a devops team with rotational on-call assignments.