Alert — Error → Slack/Sentry Bootstrap

Make a service tell you when it breaks in production, without a silent no-op. The pattern is the same across stacks: one reporting seam → fan out to logging + Sentry + Slack → dedupe → gate behind a flag → seed the secret and deploy in the correct order. Most rollouts get bitten by the plumbing, not the code — this front-loads those traps.

North star: every unhandled error and every swallowed-but-important event reaches a human channel, exactly once per incident, with enough context to act — verified live, not assumed.

Step 0 — Detect the stack and delivery path

• Language/runtime — long-running server, serverless function, background worker? Determines where the reporter seam and flush hooks go.
• Where secrets live — a cloud secret manager, CI provider secrets, or plain env vars?
• How config flags are set — a config service, a YAML file, an env var, a feature-flag provider?
• Deploy mechanism — does a fresh deploy clone the currently running config forward (common on container platforms), or rebuild config from source every time? This decides whether a new secret wires itself in automatically or needs a one-time bootstrap (see Step 4).