Kartar.Net

Using riemann.index/search inside a custom mailer body to pull related events from the Riemann index and attach context to email alerts

Looking up HAProxy node counts in Zookeeper from a Riemann stream so monitoring thresholds update without waiting for configuration convergence

A crash course in Clojure syntax, collections, functions, and namespaces that gets you ready to write Riemann configuration files

Using the Riemann mailer plug-in's :subject and :body options to build custom email alerts driven by event fields like host

A quick note that every GitHub wiki is a Git repository so you can clone it directly instead of scraping the content

Announcing a hands on book on building modern, scalable monitoring with Riemann, Graphite, Sensu, Flapjack, and Logstash

Asking the community to contribute real Riemann configurations to a shared GitHub repository to help newcomers learn the Clojure based config

Installing Graphite, configuring Carbon retention schemas, and forwarding Riemann events to generate metric graphs from Nginx status data

A simple three stage model, manual, reactive, and proactive, for describing how organisations evolve their monitoring practices

Using Riemann streams and the index to detect down services via TTL expiry, then routing alerts to email and PagerDuty

Installing Riemann and walking through its event-centric push model for aggregating, processing, and alerting on events from hosts and applications

Version 1.4.1 of The Docker Book is out, with updates and fixes for the Docker 1.4.1 release plus accumulated reader errata

Releasing the anonymised CSV source data from the 2014 monitoring survey along with notes on the R and ggplot2 analysis

Looking at unanswered alerts, undetected outages, and configuration management adoption across the 2014 survey responses

Examining what infrastructure layers respondents monitor and when checks are added during the 2014 survey results

Looking at who collects metrics and what they collect them for in the 2014 monitoring survey responses

Nagios leads the 2014 primary tool results with Icinga, Sensu, Zabbix, and New Relic also figuring strongly

Breaking down job roles, organisation sizes, and who owns monitoring across the 866 complete responses to the 2014 survey

Outlining the 12 questions, methodology, and 1,016 respondents that drove the 2014 monitoring maturity survey

Version 1.3.1 of The Docker Book is out, with updates and fixes for the Docker 1.3.1 release plus reader contributed errata

Asking readers to fill in a short anonymous survey on IT monitoring to gather data for a conference talk

Installing and configuring Puppet Blacksmith Rake tasks to automate version bumps, tagging, building, and pushing modules to the Forge

Installing the Puppet Strings face, running it against the Sensu module, and publishing the generated HTML documentation to GitHub Pages

Replacing Logstash's syslog input with tcp, udp, and grok plugins so you can catch non-RFC syslog variants and route failed parses to a file

Installing and configuring Mozilla's Go-based logging tool Heka, comparing it to Logstash for tailing files and routing events

Version 1.2.0 of The Docker Book is out, adding a section in chapter 7 on using Consul for service discovery with Docker

Version 1.1.0 of The Docker Book is out, with a new chapter on orchestration focused on Fig and the usual update instructions

Announcing the 1.0 release of The Docker Book, with download details for pre-orders and a roadmap for future updates

Packaging Reveal.JS and Wetty into a Docker image so each talk is just slides and images mounted into a container

Treating people who leave your company as alumni rather than ex-employees pays dividends through advocacy, recruiting, and future returns

A handful of Bash aliases and functions for daily Docker work, including inspecting IPs, bulk removing containers and images, and tagging builds

The Logstash Book has been revised for the 1.4.0 release, covering new installation methods, configuration language changes, and plugin updates

Combining Dockerfiles with Librarian-Puppet to reuse existing Puppet modules when building application images, demonstrated with Nginx

Leaving Venmo after the PayPal acquisition to join Docker Inc as VP of Services, building out support, training, and professional services

On why tone arguments against angry feminists protect privilege, and why their anger is what actually drives accountability and progress

Why Docker and configuration management tools like Puppet and Chef will coexist rather than one supplanting the other

A new edition of The LogStash Book ships with updates for LogStash 1.2.0, errata fixes, and a free upgrade for existing buyers

Looking for unpaid technical reviewers for an upcoming Docker book, with a credit and bio in the front matter as the reward

Tactics for cutting through change theatre and blame culture in ITIL-heavy shops by showing safe repeatable changes and centring customer needs

What a tech reviewer should and should not do, drawn from a bruising first experience on my Hardening Linux book

Common failure modes in recruiter outreach including impersonal templates, vague roles, stale CV data, and avoidance of compensation

Leaving Puppet Labs after three and a half years to become VP of Engineering at Venmo in New York

Releasing a module that ships deployment events from Puppet to the New Relic Deployment API via a custom type or a report processor

Seven practical tips for both hiring managers and candidates covering communication, on-site interviews, follow-up, and feedback

Releasing a Puppet report processor that ships each metric generated during a Puppet run to Sematext using the sematext-metrics gem

Announcing a new book on Docker covering installation, containers, services, building your own PaaS, and writing custom images

A short review of Packt's ElasticSearch Server book, praising its coverage of concepts, indexing, and administration but wanting more on scaling

On unlearning the engineer habit of getting grumpy and defensive about mistakes, and instead treating them as openings rather than punishment

Wondering whether good service can compensate for a bad product, and how the answer depends entirely on context and stakes

A memorial for Igal Koshevoy and a plea to check in on people in our community who may be struggling with their mental health