I’ve specialized in monitoring and observability for 27 years now, and I’ve seen a lot of tools and techniques come and go (RMon, anyone?); and more than a few come and stay (Rumors of the death of SNMP have been – and continue to be – greatly exaggerated.). Lately I’ve been exploring one of the more recent improvements in the space – OpenTelemetry (which I’m abbreviating to “OTel” for the remainder of this blog). I wrote about my decision to dive into OTel recently.

For the most part, I’m enjoying the journey. But there’s a problem that has existed with observability for a while now, and it’s something OTel is not helping. The title of this post hints at the issue, but I want to be more explicit. Let’s start with some comparison shopping.

Before I piss off every vendor in town, I want to be clear that these are broad, rough, high level numbers. I’ve linked to the pricing pages if you want to check the details, and I acknowledge what you see below isn’t necessarily indicative of the price you might actually pay after getting a quote on a real production environment.

When working with Terraform, managing resource dependencies effectively is key to avoiding deployment issues. Terraform is great at automatically determining the order of resource creation, but sometimes it needs a little help, this is where depends_on comes in.

In this guide, we’ll explain Terraform depends_on, how to use it, when to use it, and best practices for writing clean and efficient Terraform code.

Docker hosts and containers monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, cAdvisor, NodeExporter and AlertManager

An interactive Kubernetes log viewer for your terminal.

pgrwl is a PostgreSQL write-ahead log (WAL) receiver written in Go. It’s a drop-in, container-friendly alternative to pg_receivewal, supporting streaming replication, encryption, compression, and remote storage (S3, SFTP).

Designed for disaster recovery and PITR (Point-in-Time Recovery), pgrwl ensures zero data loss (RPO=0) and seamless integration with Kubernetes environments.

After using nix in my dotfiles for over 2 years, I’m now moving away from it.

Here’s why.

I have been using Nix regularly since roughly 2019, when I set up my primary build server to use Nix to manage the various toolchains, though it wasn't until 2022 that I really invested heavily, and I'm now using Nix in combination with other more traditional DevOps tools to provision and manage more than 10 physical machines and 50 VMs in my homelab.

A blazingly fast, minimalist directory tree viewer, written in Rust. Inspired by the command line program tree, with a powerful interactive mode.

Canine is an easy to use intuitive deployment platform for Kubernetes clusters.