Ask HN: What is an Environment?

Internally we have are having a discussion around what actually is an environment? What are the classifications of an environment? Should all environments be monitored? Is there really a difference between a dev, ref, qa, prod environment from an operations perspective.

It seems that the operational people care about all environments and want to make sure they are up. This is because if one of them goes down, then most likely they are responsible for getting it back up.

The developers only care about prod. They do not want to notified if their development environment is having issues.

I was wondering how others handle these problems internally or if we are the only ones who are having this discussion?