[superuser2]

What is suicide if not the ultimate malfunction of a person as a system? Under what twisted definition of health can something which causes death be considered healthy when there is just a sliver less of it?

We might consider emotional pain "working as intended" when it alerts its victim to a problem and motivates them to fix it.

When they cannot identify the problem, or it is beyond their (suppressed by pain) power to fix, then the pain is no longer working as intended but is going to have some other effect, such as long-term suffering and death. At that point the alert system is itself a problem.

If Nagios wakes you up in the middle of the night to tell you a server's disk is nearly full, great, fix that server. If Nagios sends a few hundred billion alerts a second about this fact causing DoS on your entire network, yes you still need to fix that disk usage, but shut Nagios up first.