Hunting For Zombie Pods
At almost exactly 0300 (UTC) on the morning of 22/05 our monitoring systems started sending alerts for a handful of websites. They had begun to respond slower. This was very strange, the sites...
Satis Queue Worker
As part of a recent server migration we had to move a Satis instance. The server it was being moved from was a baremetal server, the server it was going to was a Kubernetes cluster, quite...
On server migrations…
Server migration: there’s a term bound to strike fear into the heart. Horror stories of downtime and lost data abound. This post looks at the good and bad of our migration from dedicated to Cloud...
Misleading Validation Messages When Creating BitBucket Pipeline Variables
Just in case anyone else finds themselves wrestling with this: I was recently attempting to create BitBucket Pipeline variables via BitBuckets API using curl: curl -X POST --data...
Protecting Against Textfile Collector Script Failure
Monitoring bespoke metrics with Prometheus textfile collector scripts can fail in such a way that all your monitors look fine but actually there is a problem. Here's how to prevent that. When...
Spreadsheet hell: there has to be a better way!
Businesses run on data. And there are some really good systems available to manage some of that data. Your financial data might live in Xero or Quickbooks or Sage. And your customer data lives in...
At Montacute again
Last year we didn't quite manage to achieve all of our volunteering goals - the weather and our workload conspired against us - so this year we've made a strong start early on with a second...
Volunteering on the allotment
It's part of the human condition to not really appreciate how lucky were are. We think times are tough if we get caught in the rain, or fight with the kids. But there are people in our own...