Observability is all the rage these days, and the process of collecting metrics is getting easier. Now, the big(ger) players are getting in on the action, with Amazon releasing a Managed Prometheus offering and Grafana now providing a simplified “all-in-one” monitoring agent. This is a quick guide to show how you can couple these two together, on individual hosts, and incorporating cross-account access control. The Grafana Cloud Agent Grafana Labs have taken (some of) the best bits of the Prometheus monitoring stack and created a unified deployment that wraps the individual moving parts up into a single binary. [Read More]

I’ve recently been looking at various Kubernetes ingress controllers, and have taken a bit of a shine to Traefik. This is a quick guide to installing the Traefik controller on an existing Kubernetes cluster running inside AWS, and using the AWS Network Load Balancer to terminate SSL. Installing Traefik We’re going to use the Helm chart to install Traefik on our existing K8s cluster. In my case, the cluster has been provisioned using kops, and is additionally using the SpotInst controller to ensure the entire cluster is running on AWS Spot instances to reduce the cost. [Read More]

I recently needed to program a new device on my RFXtrx device, which can only be done using the Windows(ish)-only RFXmngr program. However, my RFXtrx is buried under the stairs, connected to my Home Assistant installation.

Thankfully, it turns out its possible to access the device over the network with reasonably minimal effort, this guide shows you how.

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AWS DataSync was launched at re:Invent 2018, and while the idea is nothing new or revolutionary - copying data between the cloud and your on premise server - there is actually so much more happening under the covers…

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If you’re using a combination of LDAP + Jenkins + a load balancer (say, AD domain controllers behind an NLB in an AWS environment) and you’re seeing odd timeout issues when users try and log in, perhaps you’re hitting problems with Java connection pooling.

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