There's plenty of ways to handle IO to log what went wrong.
I'd assume the possible alarms that are worthy of starting the program aren't so much something you leave up to discretion. If it is something bad enough the operator will want to stop the program a day or so after the alarm was triggered, the LED is plenty to say "turn me off" without cluttering your UI. The log can easily keep track of every such alarm that existed to give you a better idea of what happened while the operator was away.
All of this works without creating the excessive popup. Why would you want either less information or more popups to handle the same information?
