I’m addicted to performance metrics on my server infrastructure. For years in our on-prem environment, we monitored thousands of data points using ganglia, nagios, and zabbix. In our new AWS infrastructure, we thought we’d look for some more sophisticated options.

CloudWatch is a great concept — super-easy to configure and inexpensive. And at first glance, it actually looks pretty nice. But after I spent about 30 minutes with it, I realized it wasn’t easy to use. The units used are especially hard to interpret. This is my best attempt to explain what the network values mean.

Here are the bands I’m interested in listening more to as Lolla gets closer. Bands marked with an asterisk are those that I know I already want to see (sadly, I’m sure there will be conflicts!)

I’ve been lucky enough to go to Lollapalooza for the past 5 years. I really like to do my homework before I go so I know who I want to see. There are always tons of bands I’ve never heard of, and every year, some of them end up being my favorites at the show.

So I build Spotify playlists of every band at Lolla, using recent setlists from setlist.fm whenever it is available. A lot of work goes into this, and I’d like for people to have the chance to use these playlists.

Jason Priebe is a software developer in Raleigh, NC who has been writing software for Web and mobile devices since 1996. He does most of his development in PHP (on Linux, of course) and Javascript and has extensive experience with C, C++, Java, and .NET languages. Every once in a while, he’s struck by inspiration to post something here at smorgasbork.com.

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