My experience is that people don't do well when asked to monitor systems that rarely change for rare events. It doesn't matter how strongly you impress upon them the importance of the work or how much potential reward you dangle in front of them the monkey part of their brain will pull them from the task.

This is a common enough problem that it's a well understood factor in systems failures and has been extensively explored in literature with airline pilots, nuclear technicians and TSA X-Ray techs as human factor in engineering.