Matt Gerega

Author: Matt

  • Tech Tips – Adding Linting to C# Projects

    Among the Javascript/Typescript community, ESlint and Prettier are very popular ways to enforce some standards and formatting within your code. In trying to find similar functionality for C#, I did not find anything as ubiquitous as ESLint/Prettier, but there are some front runners. Roslyn Analyzers and Dotnet Format John Reilly has a great post on…

  • Deprecating Microsoft Teams Notifications

    My first “owned” open source project was a TeamCity plugin to send notifications to Microsoft Teams based on build notifications in Teamcity. It was based on a similar TeamCity plugin for Slack. Why? Well, out of necessity. Professionally, we were migrating to using MS Teams, and we wanted functionality to post messages when builds failed/succeeded.…

  • Information Overload: When too much data becomes a problem

    I have had this post in a draft for almost a month now. I had planned to include statistics around the amount of data that humans are generating (it is a lot) and how we as are causing some of own problems by having too much data at our fingertips. What I realized is, a…

  • Pulling metrics from Home Assistant into Prometheus

    I have setup an instance of Home Assistant as the easiest front end for interacting with my home automation setup. While I am using the Universal Devices ISY994 as the primary communication hub for my Insteon devices, Home Assistant provides a much nicer interface for my family, including a great mobile app for them to…

  • Bruce Lee to the Rescue! Health Checks for .NET Worker Services

    As we start to develop more containers that are being run in Kubernetes, we encounter non-http workloads. I came across a workload that represents a non-http processor for queued events. In .NET, I used the IHostedService offerings to run a simple service in a container to do this work. However, when it came time to…

  • MMM-PrometheusAlerts: Display Alerts in Magic Mirror

    I have had MagicMirror running for about a year now, and I love having it in my office. A quick glance gives my family and I a look at information that is relevant for the days ahead. As I continue my dive into Prometheus for monitoring, it occurred to me that I might be able…

  • Lessons in Managing my Kubernetes Cluster: Man Down!

    I had a bit of a panic this week as routine tasks took me down a rabbit hole in Kubernetes. The more I manage my home lab clusters, the more I realize I do not want to be responsible for bare metal clusters at work. It was a typical upgrade… With ArgoCD in place, the…

  • Hitting for the cycle…

    Well, I may not be hitting for the cycle, but I am certainly cycling Kubernetes nodes like it is my job. The recent OpenSSL security patches got me thinking that I need to cycle my cluster nodes. A Quick Primer In Kubernetes, a “node” is, well, a machine performing some bit of work. It could…

  • What’s in a (Release) Name?

    With Rancher gone, one of my clusters was dedicated to running Argo and my standard cluster tools. Another cluster has now become home for a majority of the monitoring tools, including the Grafana/Loki/Mimir/Tempo stack. That second cluster was running a little hot in terms of memory and CPU. I had 6 machines running what 4-5…

  • A Lesson in Occam’s Razor: Configuring Mimir Ruler with Grafana

    Occam’s Razor posits “Of two competing theories, the simpler explanation is to be preferred.” I believe my high school biology teacher taught the “KISS” method (Keep It Simple, Stupid) to convey a similar principle. As I was trying to get alerts set up in Mimir using the Grafana UI, I came across an issue that…