When Prometheus Runs Out of Room You've got Prometheus running, it's scraping your endpoints every 15 seconds, Grafana dashboards look great, and alerting is working. Life is good. Then someone asks "can we look at metrics from six months ago?" and you realize your
What Is TLS On-Demand in Caddy? Caddy is famous for making HTTPS easy. Normally, you pre-configure domains, and Caddy automatically fetches and renews certificates from Let’s Encrypt or ZeroSSL. But what if you don’t know all the domains in advance? That’s where TLS On-Demand comes in. Instead
DHH Made an Arch Linux Distro, and It's Actually Pretty Good If you've spent any time configuring Arch Linux with a tiling window manager, you know the drill. Hours of dotfile tweaking, chasing down dependencies, getting your status bar to look right, making sure everything plays
Every incident retrospective includes someone asking "what was our MTTR?" And every time, there's a brief awkward pause while people figure out what exactly they're measuring. Did we start the clock when the alert fired, or when the server actually went down? Does it
Nagios has been around since 1999. That's not a dig; it's genuinely impressive. Most software from that era is either dead or unrecognizable, but Nagios is still running in production at thousands of organizations, doing exactly what it was designed to do. There's something
Comparing monitoring tools is a bit like comparing hammers to screwdrivers. You can argue about which one is "better," but the real question is what you're actually trying to do. HetrixTools and FiveNines both call themselves monitoring platforms, but they're solving different problems for
load average: 0.35, 0.42, 0.40 You've seen this line a thousand times. Maybe you glance at it, shrug, and move on to the CPU percentages that seem more useful. Three cryptic decimal numbers don't exactly demand attention, and honestly, nobody explains what they
Most disk failures aren't sudden. The drive doesn't work perfectly on Tuesday and explode on Wednesday. There's usually a warning period: SMART errors accumulating, reallocated sectors ticking upward, I/O latency creeping higher. The problem is that nobody's looking at these signals
Everyone wants 99.999% uptime. It's right there in our company name, so clearly we think it's a worthy goal. But here's the thing: five nines means about 5 minutes of total downtime per year. Not per server, not per service. Total. If your