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Bad Monitoring Systems are like Car Alarms
At least the boy who cried “wolf” stayed by his sheep
Imagine you’re in your house, and outside the window, someone’s car alarm is going off.
You rush over to the window (oh no someone’s being robbed! grand theft auto!) and you look out at the street. You see a car, with no one around, blinking and sputtering its annoying alarm. You turn away frustrated and go back to whatever you’re doing, possibly putting on headphones to tune it out.
The next time it happens, you maybe look out the window eventually, but once again, no robbers.
Eventually, the car alarms are just annoyances; it turns out that people just don’t park very well and when cars shoot by them, it rocks the car and sets off the alarm.
If someone actually were having their car stolen, at this point (many false alarms later) you wouldn’t care. The boy who cried wolf, but with an automated system instead of a bored shepherd. This is in many ways what we could liken to:
Bad Monitoring Systems
There are really two modes for bad monitoring systems. There’s either:
- Everything is broken but the monitoring system is silent
- Nothing is broken but the monitoring system won’t shut up
