I recently needed to export all the articles from a GitHub wiki. I had thought I’d need to scrape it but I discovered that each GitHub wiki is in fact a Git repo. If you need a copy of the content you can just clone it via Git. 1 $ git clone git@github.com:username/repo_name.wiki.git That’s neat and I hope it’s useful to someone else.

TL;DR - I am writing a book about monitoring and you can sign up for updates here. Let’s begin with an origin story. Once upon a time(-series) there was a sysadmin. She managed infrastructure that lived in a data center. Every time a new host was added to that environment she installed some software and setup some checks. Every now and again one of those servers would break and a check would trigger.

One of the challenges of getting to know Riemann is that its configuration is in Clojure. Your Riemann configuration is actually a Clojure program that executes when Riemann is running. For some folks this is a very new language and sometimes a new approach. To help with this process I’m keen on collecting a bunch of sample Riemann configurations from people who have already “been there and done this”. There are a few already online - The Guardian have theirs up for example - but I’d love to have more.

In my first post I introduced you to Riemann and my second post discussed Riemann for fault detection. In those posts we’ve discovered that Riemann aggregates events from distributed hosts and services. One of the cool outcomes of this aggregation is the ability to generate metrics from the events. We can then use a tool like Graphite to store the metric data and render graphs from it. In this post you’ll see how to:

I’ve been thinking a lot about monitoring maturity. Based on some research I did last year and a number of conversations with people in the industry I’ve documented a simple monitoring maturity model. I present it largely because some folks might be interested rather than as any sweeping revelation. The three level maturity model reflects the various stages of monitoring evolution I’ve seen organizations experience. The three stages are: Manual Reactive Proactive Onto the details of the stages.