DIAG-13 · Diagnosis · Invariant — holds by construction, no expiry
Alerts act only through responses
The law
Alerts protect only through triggered responses. A capacity-limited operator sustainably responds only while precision times avoided loss exceeds handling cost; below that threshold response extinguishes, so a noisier, more-sensitive monitor protects strictly less than a quieter one.
Scope
Alert-triggered protection with positive per-alert handling cost and bounded response capacity.
What this licenses you to do
Track response rate and precision per alert class as first-class metrics; delete or threshold-gate any class whose response rate is near zero; size total alert volume to operator capacity.
Evidence
Observed repeatedly in production alerting systems: a delivery-broken alert channel can go unnoticed for months because nothing is tracking the response rate itself, and a high-volume alert class with a near-zero resolution rate quietly trains operators to ignore it. Both are this law in action.