Achromatic by default. Saturated only where it carries operational meaning — a four-word vocabulary: crit, warn, info, good. Everything else is gray. That's the deal.
Crit is reserved. It's the color of a phone ringing at 3am. We earned the right to make red mean something operational by refusing to use it as a brand color, a decorative accent, or a hover state. When you see crit, somebody is being woken up.
Warn is what wakes you up gracefully — the cert expiring next week, the disk at 92%, the SLA with fourteen minutes left. It earns a row in your queue, sorted by breach window, but it doesn't ring anyone's phone. Warn is the system asking for a glance, not a hero.
Info doesn't interrupt anyone. A new device joined the domain. A patch window opened. The morning report rolled up. Info is searchable, audited, and quiet — the receipts you want when something goes wrong tomorrow, not the noise you want today.
Good is for closed loops. The cluster recovered itself. The VPN came back up. The SLA window slipped past, intact. We use good sparingly — a green sea would be just another color — but when something resolves without a human, you should know it happened and then forget about it.
Marcus has the on-call until 08:00 UTC. Devon owns escalation. Your queue is waiting with 4 open, two of them P1. The room is quiet for now — most of the page is gray.
No card. No trial timer. Operator seats only — invited by your service manager.