At my previous (and first) software engineering job my team had set up a TON of monitoring and alerts in different channels (slack, email, grafana, etc) and since these systems were built before I arrived, I took for granted how much more efficient they made things...I just learned to use them because they were there and they worked.

When I went to my next job where monitoring and alerts weren't set up I realized how spoiled I was. Over time I got more and more frustrated with being unable to diagnose and fix issues quickly until I finally caved in to the tedious task of setting up monitoring.

Agree with this thread 1000% monitoring is key best decision I made