My monitoring cried wolf until I stopped listening, so I fixed the wolf

Monitoring only works if you still read the alerts. Mine come from three places: an uptime monitor checking every service, a network scanner that notices devices coming and going, and the server's own health alerts. All of it lands as push notifications on my phone, and for a while that phone buzzed so often that I'd stopped looking at it. That's the real failure mode, and it's sneakier than any outage.

What actually works

• Keyword checks, not just status codes. A proxy will happily return 200 for an error page. Checking that the response contains a word you expect catches that instantly.
• Heartbeats for scheduled jobs. The nightly sync pings the monitor when it finishes. If the ping doesn't show up, that's the alert, and it catches the job that silently never started.
• Retries before alerting. Two failed checks in a row before anyone gets notified wipes out most of the noise from brief network blips.
• Let sleepy devices sleep. Battery and Wi-Fi gadgets that doze to save power get 30 minutes to vanish before they count as down.

What got muted

One Wi-Fi camera drops off the network many times a day and comes back a minute later. Every drop meant a "down" notification and a "reconnected" notification, and within a week I was ignoring both, along with everything else. Down alerts for that one device are now off. It still shows online or offline on the dashboard; it just doesn't get to wake me up.

Connect and disconnect alerts for phones are off too. People coming and going isn't an incident.

Rule of thumb: if an alert never makes you do anything, fix it or delete it.