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Field notes on monitoring
Honest writing about uptime, on-call, and running reliable systems for other people.
FeaturedJul 2, 2026 · 8 min read
Status-by-colour-alone is failing your on-call
A red dot tells you something is wrong. It doesn’t tell you what, since when, or whether you can trust it. Here’s how we designed Vigil so severity is never carried by colour alone — and why your dashboard probably gets this wrong.
Read articlePlaybook6 min read
Monitoring WordPress without installing a plugin
Core version drift, exposed xmlrpc, leaked debug logs — all catchable from the outside.
Model7 min read
Runbooks, not dashboards
Why we model monitoring as named, scheduled runbooks instead of a wall of graphs.
Security5 min read
Keeping secrets write-only (and why you should)
A monitoring tool holding readable credentials is a breach waiting to happen. Ours can’t.