I’d love to run a monolith if I could, but I fortunetly I need to grant different permissions to different components (some are encryptors and others are decryptors).

I still develop the system as a single deplorable artifact. Has made my life somewhat simpler.

We’ve been using Heroku’s SHH to pipe host metrics to Librato. PagerDuty provides pretty good integration to Librato so setting up metrics-based alerts is pretty simple.

Good thing is you don’t have to run a service like Graphite (I used to in the past, and I don’t want to back to that time in my life). Librato isn’t free, of course, and like all providers they have occasional (but rare) service disruptions. Then again, so did my setup a while back.

Awk is one of those tools I learned how to use very recently. It is now my go-to tool for reformatting all sorts of things into SQL queries, code snippets etc. I would encourage people to look at this article and dig into Awk, especially if operations are a part of your job description.