Field Notes
What a decade of pager duty taught me about alert design
Most pages were not incidents. The useful ones shared three properties.
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Reading a BGP looking glass like a diagnostician
A practical walkthrough of AS-path prepending, communities and local preference.
Tooling
A four-line change that removed 30% of our log volume
Dropping duplicate request IDs at the edge beat every sampling strategy we tried.
Postmortem
The outage that was actually a clock skew
Two hosts, 400 ms of drift and a certificate check that failed exactly once.
Hardware
Running a home lab that survives firmware updates
Buying older enterprise gear is cheap; keeping it patched is the real project.
Method
Estimating traffic without instrumentation
Back-of-envelope models that stay honest when dashboards are unavailable.