[madhadron]

> If you've designed software where the whole service can degrade based on the CPU consumption of a single machine, that right there is your problem and no amount of alerting can help you.

Unless it's your database.

[learnfromstory]

If you have "the database" then you're fucked anyway and probably your thing isn't on the scale that we are discussing.

[cameronbrown]

If you're using a sharded SQL database then a single machine going bad could still affect thousands of people.