[allenu]

We had a case of this recently where I work.

The project I've been on for the last couple of years has had dashboards and monitors and we as engineers have been striving to keep the system humming and if any issues trigger alarms, we jump on them.

More recently there's been a push to handle alarms more quickly (get those response times down!). I'm not sure why since I don't know if we've really had user complaints about any of this (not that our systems are perfect, but the user-facing issues aren't due to us not responding quickly enough to alarms). It never made sense to me that these numbers were of utmost importance, and important enough to visit in biweekly status meetings.

Your post now makes me see more clearly what I had a hunch: somebody decided to take on this mission of getting response times down as an action item and by god everyone in their org is going to meet that mission.

Anyway, the product we were working on got cancelled recently, which funnily enough has nothing to do with alarm response time or any of our engineering dashboards and more to do with the "money in/money out" metric. Fancy that.