Implementing alerts in a deployed data pipeline, especially in a high-stakes environment like financial services, is crucial for ensuring the pipeline's reliability and performance. Alerts serve to immediately notify relevant teams of any issues that could impact transaction processing, such as pipeline failures, performance degradation, or data quality issues. This proactive monitoring is essential for maintaining data integrity, complying with financial regulations, and minimizing operational disruptions. The other options, while potentially relevant to data pipeline management, do not directly address the primary purpose of alerts, which is to facilitate real-time issue detection and response.