Every Prometheus metric is one of four types, and two of them — Counter and Gauge — are simple enough that most people get them right on instinct. The other two, Histogram and Summary, are where nearly every “why is…
Blackbox Exporter and Custom Metrics: Monitoring What Your Other Tools Can’t See
Node Exporter will tell you CPU, memory, and disk are all fine. Apache’s access log will show clean 200s. And your site can still be unreachable — an expired cert, a DNS record pointing at the wrong IP after a…
Building Mileage Without Breaking: The Science Behind Progressive Zone 2 Volume
The previous post covered what Zone 2 training actually does physiologically. This one is narrower and more practical: how to build weekly mileage without undoing that work through injury — which, for most recreational runners, is the actual failure mode…
Heart Rate Zones, Properly Explained: Why Zone 2 Builds the Aerobic Base That Everything Else Depends On
Every few months a new device or app tells recreational runners the same thing: you’re training too hard, too often, and it’s quietly working against you. It sounds like clickbait, but it’s one of the more robustly supported claims in…
Urgent vs Important: Designing Homelab Alerts That Don’t Wake You Up for Nothing
A while back my phone buzzed at 2am because a Docker container’s disk usage crossed 80%. Not full. Not about to crash anything. Eighty percent, on a volume with 40GB spare. I turned the alert off, annoyed at myself, and…
One Login for Every Log: Centralising a Homelab with Grafana Loki
For years my “log aggregation strategy” was: SSH into whichever box was misbehaving, and grep around until something looked wrong. Router logs lived on the router. Docker logs lived in docker logs, one container at a time. Apache and AdGuard…
The Four Golden Signals: What Google’s SRE Book Got Right (And What My Homelab Taught Me About Them)
Google’s Site Reliability Engineering book devotes a section of its chapter on monitoring distributed systems to four signals it argues are the minimum set worth alerting on for almost any user-facing system: latency, traffic, errors, and saturation. It’s one of…
Can an LLM Actually Help You Debug a 3am Page? Here’s What I’ve Found
“AI is going to fix observability” is one of those claims that’s simultaneously overhyped and underexplained. Overhyped, because most of the marketing around it implies something close to an autonomous SRE that reads your systems and tells you what’s wrong.…
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IPFiX ? urr
I have recently been working on a project that involves working with ipfix/netflow, this was a new concept to me, I primarily deal with data ingestion and analysis of network traffic for monitoring and security purposes, we needed to ingest…