Introducing Sockii: HTTP and WebSocket aggregator
Developing the upcoming Server Density v2 over the past year has forced us to tackle some very interesting and difficult problems. This post introduces Sockii, a Node.js daemon which aggregates [...]
What causes delays in software projects
For the last few weeks I’ve been testing a new storage backend for the server monitoring time series data we collect in Server Density, used to power our graphs and [...]
How to build stunning custom iOS graphs on iPhone and iPad
A couple of weeks ago, we released a big update to our iOS server monitoring app app, adding graph support on both iPhone + iPad. It’s an update that we’ve [...]
Sending async SMS with Node.js and cloud devops bots
Tom wasn’t the only one having fun at LeedsHack last month! One idea idea I’ve had a for while now, mostly since seeing a talk on Github’s Hubot at a conference last year and writing hippybot , is [...]
Logging for fun and profit
Once you have more than a few servers and applications running, handling all those logs is going to become a problem. Not in the sense of managing rotation – syslog [...]
Removing Memcached because it’s too slow
Update There has been a lot of discussion of this post around whether this is a problem with Memcached or something else. The post content is accurate but in hindsight, [...]
Python daemon class
Our server monitoring agent has always run as a daemon on Unix, Linux and OS X because you want it to just work and not be messing with background tasks [...]
Queueing MongoDB using MongoDB
Several months ago we started seeing increased response times in our server monitoring application, Server Density. The problem was growing slowly over time and it quickly became clear that MongoDB [...]
On shortened field names in MongoDB
Last night we got almost 10k unique visitors in just a few hours because of a post disputing a minor point of a post I wrote in July 2009. The [...]
Android push notifications (tutorial)
Perhaps the most important feature of our server monitoring iPhone and Android apps is the ability to receive alerts via push notification directly to your device. On the iPhone, notifications [...]