Everyone's building AI-powered anomaly detection these days. Machine learning models trained on your metrics, neural networks that understand your seasonal patterns, algorithms that promise to catch the unknown unknowns. It's impressive tech, and the demos look fantastic. But here's what the vendors won'
In financial services, every minute of downtime doesn't just anger users, it triggers regulatory scrutiny and potential fines. While your typical SaaS company might shrug off a few minutes of downtime with a status page apology, financial institutions face a completely different reality. The moment your trading platform
When your Prometheus server needs 64GB RAM just to track which user clicked which button, you've got a cardinality problem. Someone adds a user_id label to track user behavior, suddenly metrics storage balloons from gigabytes to hundreds of gigabytes, queries start timing out, monitoring bills triple overnight,
Your Kubernetes cron jobs are probably failing silently right now, and you have no idea. You migrate your perfectly good cron jobs to Kubernetes, pat yourself on the back for being "cloud native," and then discover weeks later that your database backups haven't run since the
You're staring at a server that feels sluggish. Users are complaining. You fire up top and see CPU usage sitting at 50%. Plenty of headroom, right? So why does everything feel like it's wading through mud? The answer usually lives in a number you might be
Your security team said no to opening monitoring ports, but your services still need 24/7 oversight. Here's how to monitor everything while keeping your firewall locked down. I get it. You've got a bunch of internal services running behind firewalls, and the security folks are
The scariest server problems aren't the ones that trigger alerts, they're the ones that slowly degrade performance while flying under your monitoring radar. You know the pattern. Everything looks fine on the dashboards. CPU usage is normal, memory's stable, disk space isn't
While everyone's optimizing Docker images for size, most are still using heavyweight monitoring solutions that contradict their efficiency goals. You've stripped your Alpine images down to 5MB, configured multi-stage builds, and argue about whether to use scratch as your base image. But then you slap on
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