Unobservable Failure

Kind: anti-pattern

Layer: Enforcement Core

Aliases: Opaque System

Record: architecture:unobservable-failure

Severity: discouraged

Scope: contract_compatibility

Formed by: Permit operations to fail without structured logs, metrics, alerts, traces, audit records, or user-visible error contracts.

Canonical: Ontology

A defect in which an operation can fail without leaving a log, metric, trace or error contract.

Listed in Architecture principles, after Unowned Risk and before Unversioned Breaking Change.

Refactored by

• Error Boundaries
• Structured Log
• Metrics
• Alert on Critical Failure
• Trace Span
• Audit Logging

Severity

• discouraged

Category

• Anti-patterns

Force

• Contract compatibility

Detected by

• rules/eslint/no-swallowed-failure.eslint.rule.ts
• rules/eslint/require-signal-guard.eslint.rule.ts

Negated by

• Observability

Violates

• Logging
• Alerting

Linked from

• Seven controls, seven classes
• Anti-patterns
• Observability / Auditability / Traceability
• Core Vocabulary
• Observability / Auditability / Traceability
• Failure shapes
• Severity levels
• The forces