From my perspective, this is the only way that one can do business now-a-days. It's not because people demand good customer service or that they have a responsibility to do it. It's because not doing it takes more work and more effort over the long run.

So, Slicehost has something monitoring their boxen and alerting them and they deal with the problems. What if they didn't? They'd be getting emails from customers, have to go check it out, most of the time it would be the customer's fault (they powered it down or turned off the Apache service or set the firewall rules wrong) and they'd waste all this time and effort for nothing. It wouldn't make their service better. It's just spinning one's wheels and worse, it doesn't scale. If you're constantly checking boxen, you're going to have to hire more staff as you grow to also check on boxen.

And this is something that one can automate. It both lowers the amount of labor, effort, confusion, and swearing involved and raises the level of service offered.

I see it the way I see my code tests. Sure, they're annoying to write sometimes, but what's more annoying in the long run is having random errors that I don't know about or worrying that a change I made broke something not readily apparent. My tests make my software glamorous because, while they aren't glamorous or cool or anything, they prevent me from having to do even less glamorous things later as I scramble to fix something.

I just couldn't imagine working where I didn't have things watching my back like that. It would be a nightmare of "oh $#*^! what's wrong" and lots of time/energy/effort wasted on something even more annoying than being prepared.