Fresh/Brewed

This is not a sharp picture - not even that good. I was flying early in the morning friday July 19th when I realized something was really wrong. The ticket counter was in a flurry of checking lists and creating paper tickets. I would learn within 30m that Spirit Airlines was SOL in the airport and the TSA was checking my paper ticket against printed manifests. I couldn't be prouder of my own teams at work for having dug in and weathered the Crowdstrike storm - it's a testament of having skilled, available and committed SREs. By the time I landed and was back at my desk to help, the main production systems were healthy. I can't really speak to the rest - but my day wrapped later than usual friday but it was an amazing team effort and really, I couldn't be prouder of the people I work with at WellSky

Zabbix: Part 2: Configuration and Usage

Published Apr 18, 2023 by Isaac Johnson

We spoke of Zabbix last week showing setup and basic usage. Let’s continue that into a more full formed implementation.

Zabbix: Part 1: Introduction and Setup

Published Apr 13, 2023 by Isaac Johnson

I was reviewing some Open Source monitoring solutions recently when I got turned on to Zabbix. I was surprised this hadn’t come across my path earlier. It’s been out since 2005 and is a really st...

Cast.ai for K8s Cost Optimization

Published Apr 11, 2023 by Isaac Johnson

Cast.ai came up in a search for Open-Source Cost Management tools (that I have yet to try). While it isn’t open-source, at least as of a couple years ago, the founder promised to make it free for ...

Let's play with AI: Bard, Bing and ChatGPT

Published Apr 6, 2023 by Isaac Johnson

I recently was admitted into the Google Bard trial. I felt it would be a great time to contrast Bard with ChatGPT and Bing.

ConfigU: A SaaS offering for SCM

Published Apr 4, 2023 by Isaac Johnson

Ran Cohen, CTO/Co-Founder of ConfigU asked me to take a look at their offering; ConfigU, “Configuration Management as a Service”. I’m always game to check out new DevOps, SCM and SRE tools and if ...

Ansible and Terraform: Github

Published Mar 30, 2023 by Isaac Johnson

Monday, I covered setting up Terraform to fire up an Ansible playbook during Infrastructure creation time. While that worked fine, we ideally would like to keep our playbooks in GIT.