Comment by Melonai

16 hours ago

That sounds awful and will send administrators on a wild goose chase throughout their stack to find the issue without many clues except this thing is failing at seemingly random times. (I myself would suspect something related to network connectivity, maybe requests are timing out? This idea would lead me in the completely wrong direction.)

It also does not give any way to actually see a warning message, where would we even put it? I know for a fact that if my glibc DNS resolver started spitting out errors into /var/log/god_knows_what I would take days to find it, at best the resolver could return some kind of errno with perror giving us a message like "The DNS response has not been correctly formatted", and then hope that the message is caught and forwarded through whatever is wrapping the C library, hopefully into our stderr. And there's so many ways even that could fail.

So we arrive at the logical conclusion: You send errors in morse code, encoded as seconds/minutes of failures/successes. Any reasonable person would be able to recognize morse when seeing the patterns on a observability graph.

Start with milliseconds, move on to seconds and so on as the unwanted behavior continues.