Hello, everyone!
Welcome to my blog. My name is Gerhard Pegel, and I am thrilled to share my journey and insights with you. I’m a proud member of ‘Team Observability’ at Wehkamp, where I work as a cloud engineer specializing in monitoring, alerting, logging, and dashboards.
In my role, I have the opportunity to work with a range of powerful tools and technologies. Some of my go-to solutions include Zabbix, Prometheus, Thanos, AlertManager, ElasticSearch, Kibana and Grafana. These tools allow me to dive deep into the data, analyze performance, and provide valuable insights to ensure the robustness of our systems.
Driven by my passion for experimentation and continuous learning, I’ve set up my own homelab that is running on a (old) HP DL360 G8 with 32 vCPU’s and 96 GB of RAM and 4TB storage. It serves as a testing ground where I can explore and push the boundaries of the software I work with. It’s an invaluable space for me to experiment, troubleshoot, and uncover new possibilities.
In addition to my core responsibilities, I’m deeply passionate about exploring the world of infrastructure automation and containerization. To achieve this, I leverage powerful provisioning tools like Ansible and Terraform. These tools enable me to streamline the deployment process, making it efficient, scalable, and reproducible.
Within my own homelab, which runs on Proxmox, I love pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. It serves as my personal playground, where I experiment with deploying containers and even setting up Kubernetes clusters. This hands-on experience allows me to gain valuable insights into the intricacies of managing and orchestrating applications at scale.
When it comes to infrastructure as code (IaC), Terraform is my go-to tool. With its powerful and intuitive syntax, I can define and manage my infrastructure resources in a scalable and version-controlled manner. Whether it’s spinning up virtual machines, configuring networking, or managing storage, Terraform ensures the reproducibility and scalability of my homelab environment.
Why I’m using opensource tools as much as possible?
Open-source tools have revolutionized the world of technology by providing accessible, community-driven solutions that can be freely utilized and adapted. By harnessing the power of these open-source tools, I’ve been able to create efficient and cost-effective monitoring, alerting, and logging systems that don’t compromise on functionality or quality.
For instance, Zabbix, an open-source monitoring solution, allows me to proactively monitor the health and performance of our systems. Prometheus, together with its scalable querying language and flexible alerting capabilities, ensures that we stay on top of potential issues and maintain robustness.
To achieve long-term storage and analysis of metrics, I integrate Thanos, an open-source project that extends Prometheus with highly available and durable storage capabilities. AlertManager, another open-source tool, enables me to manage and route alerts seamlessly, ensuring prompt responses to critical events.
For centralized log management and analysis, I rely on the ELK stack, consisting of ElasticSearch, Logstash, and Kibana. This powerful combination allows me to collect, store, and visualize logs effectively, gaining valuable insights into the health and performance of our systems.
To present this wealth of information in a visually appealing and easily understandable way, Grafana comes into play. Grafana, an open-source dashboarding platform, helps me create stunning visualizations and dashboards that provide actionable insights to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
And the best part of this all is, it’s totally free!
Let’s wrap it up.
By harnessing the power of open-source tools, I’ve been able to mitigate costs without sacrificing functionality or compromising on the quality of our observability systems. In this blog, I’ll share my experiences, best practices, and tips for utilizing these open-source tools effectively, empowering you to do the same.
Thank you for joining me on this blogging journey! I’m grateful for your presence and excited to engage with like-minded individuals. Let’s create a space where we can learn from each other’s experiences and insights. Together, we’ll explore cloud engineering, observability, and open-source tools, fostering a collaborative environment. I look forward to connecting, sharing knowledge, and inspiring one another.
Gerhard Pegel