A pipeline health check judged every data source on the same "newest row older than 2-3 days = stale" rule. Two sources legitimately write slower: one serves weekly aggregated points (its newest day is 7-13 days old on any morning) and one is validated ~7 days late by the provider. Both alarmed every single morning while healthy. Three of eight daily problems were false, which trains the operator to stop reading the list and miss the real failures (a scraper starved on four days that month).

A daily pipeline disabled a broken scraper behind an opt-in flag. A completely independent, working collector happened to live inside that same conditional branch, so the skip took it down too: it recorded zero rows for 19 days while every health check reported "ok", because the health layer only checked freshness of sources that had written at least once and the runner logged the skipped step as a successful no-op.

Push notifications published to ntfy.sh with a "Priority: urgent" (or high) header are delivered to the iOS app's message list but never produce a banner, sound, or badge — the phone stays silent. Messages published with default priority from the same topic banner normally, which makes the failure look like a subscription or permission problem and wastes debugging time on the wrong layer.

Getting CPU usage, memory statistics, and disk space information on macOS for a monitoring dashboard, system tray app, or CLI tool. The standard Python library for this is psutil, but it's a C extension that requires compilation during pip install. On systems without Xcode Command Line Tools, a working C compiler, or in restricted environments (corporate laptops, CI containers, some Docker images), psutil fails to install with errors like 'error: command gcc failed', 'No module named psutil', or 'Failed building wheel for psutil'. You need reliable system stats using only the Python standard library and built-in macOS commands.