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Real time monitoring of IT infrastructures is a critical topic.

Whatever the context may be, detecting system failures in near-real-time is key to SLA compliance and deep knowledge of the most critical failure points is one of the best way to provide a solid and reliable infrastructure.

Because of this reason, I always set up redundant monitoring and alerting systems for the infrastructures I manage.

My tool of choice for nodes and resources monitoring is Amon.

Since my girlfriend moved in to live with me, we have a spare house that is up for rent. Being in the universitary district, many students come and go and it can be difficult to remember of everything about rents, bills, house maintenance, contracts and so on.

We decide to simplify our and our tenant’s lives, by managing everything by ourselves and giving them a single online application where they can see everything in a single place: due payments, rents, bills, personal documents and so on.

We offer SMS and email notifications to tenants and their parents, together with pay-with-paypal or Satispay flows in order to simplify money management.

Continuous integration and delivery is now a critical requirement for every efficient development and application-management process, and its importance cannot be stressed enough.

In order to provide CI/CD features and multi-node automation processes I setup a dedicated Jenkins server that handles all of the dirty work in an automated and reliable way.

The Internet is a dangerous place.

Performance is important, but security is a top-priority.

Cloudflare serves both purposes.

Debugging environments is hard. Development on shared environments is cumbersome. Automated testing on physical infrastructures is terribly unreliable.

Virtualization technologies are extremely helpful and tackle all of the above problems by providing developers and testers with a on-demand local environment which is an exact copy of the production environment but self contained on the local machine: no development clash, no data loss, repeatable automated test flows all come for free.

Real time monitoring of application services is a critical topic.

Whatever the context may be, detecting system failures in near-real-time is key to SLA compliance and deep knowledge of the most critical failure points is one of the best way to provide a solid and reliable infrastructure.

Because of this reason, I always set up redundant monitoring and alerting systems for the infrastructures I manage.

My tool of choice for application-level monitoring is UptimeRobot.

Distributed infrastructures are always difficult to monitor. You have to get on multiple nodes to check for multiple logs get sometimes get deleted too soon.

A centralized log ingestion and management platform is a must for the System-Engineer-Who-Doesn’t-Want-To-Get-Crazy.

Being kind of a geek I always wanted to have a smart house.

Having installed Philips Hue lights and sensors, HoneyWell thermostat with smart valves, TPLink smart sockets and other sensors I wanted to centralize everything in a single application in order to have everything in a single place.

Money is difficult to manage. I made this online application to have a comprehensive money management, budgeting and planning tool.

Every microservice environment needs a gateway. This is my gateway.