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.…