Why Blast Radius Analysis Does Not End When Alerts Fire
Modern distributed systems fail in ways that can bypass even well-designed isolation patterns. When a failure is actively propagating across services at four in the morning, the question shifts from “how do we limit the blast radius” to “how do we confirm what it actually is.” Monitoring shows which services are in the impact zone, but it cannot show what code path caused the failure to spread, or whether it has stopped.