Clicking on "Examine" should take you to a SoM page with more detail about the failure, e.g.:
https://sheriff-o-matic.appspot.com/gardener/examine/chromeos:cyan-chrome-pfq:2143

Does it not do that for you?

The link in #1 takes me to a page that says:
Home | Search
Login
Error: 401

You are not authenticated, please try logging in
Request ID: 5a30896600ff085b1f1be9899c0001737e6c7563692d6d696c6f0001323437382d3837613262616500010101
LUCI, working for the Chromium project.
built: 2017-12-12 5:59 PM (PST)
version: 2478-87a2bae

Once I select "log in", I get a page containing:
Resolved: 
cyan-chrome-pfq:2143 failed
Builds: 2143-2143

Following the same link for the second time takes me to to another place, with a contents identical to the one of https://sheriff-o-matic.appspot.com/gardener. I.e. the page with the checkboxes.

Pressing the Expand button behaves same way as opening the above link. The console output looks like:
GET https://luci-milo.appspot.com/buildbot/chromeos/peppy-chrome-pfq/4498 401 ()

Ok the login weirdness is because LUCI-milo is iframe-d in and it's from a different origin (and once you log in to LUCI-milo that step shouldn't happen again for a ~long time).

Ok, when I click on "Examine" in an alert on  https://sheriff-o-matic.appspot.com/gardener it takes me to https://sheriff-o-matic.appspot.com/gardener/examine/chromeos:lumpy-chrome-pfq:11091 and I see this: https://screenshot.googleplex.com/dgwZNWVydqL 

And you're saying it also takes you to a url like https://sheriff-o-matic.appspot.com/gardener/examine/chromeos:lumpy-chrome-pfq:11091 by it literally just shows you the same page you see at https://sheriff-o-matic.appspot.com/gardener ?

Sorry for all the back and forth - I just need to be able to repro this on my end.

Pressing on any of "Examine" links in https://sheriff-o-matic.appspot.com/gardener takes me to pages like https://sheriff-o-matic.appspot.com/gardener/examine/chromeos:lumpy-chrome-pfq:11091 that are identical to the original page. See Ctrl-Click behavior below.

https://sheriff-o-matic.appspot.com/gardener/examine/chromeos:cyan-chrome-pfq:2143
Takes me to same-as-original page if I copy-paste URL, and if I ctrl-click at it, sometimes it takes me to the same place, and sometimes (this started recently and became quite stable) to the builder page with steps.

A-ha; now I see that Examine does: it opens the builder information in the lower section of the web page.
I didn't see this because the browser was showing only the upper part of the web page with check boxes. This is still an issue. I'd suggest Examine to open the link in a new tab.

BTW, once the lower part of the web page shows the builder, I see a section of "annotations" that is similar to the one with "examine", but instead of "examine", it shows "gardener", and the purpose of this isn't clear.