Off-Call with Paige Cruz: It’s the Network Part 2

Paige Cruz is a Senior Developer Advocate at Chronosphere passionate about cultivating sustainable on-call practices and bringing folks their aha moment with observability. She started as a software engineer at New Relic before switching to Site Reliability Engineering holding the pager for InVision, Lightstep, and Weedmaps. Off-the-clock you can find her spinning yarn, swooning over alpacas, or watching trash TV on Bravo.

In my sordid career, I have been an actor, bug exterminator and wild-animal remover (nothing crazy like pumas or wildebeests. Just skunks, snakes, and raccoons.), electrician, carpenter, stage-combat instructor, ASL interpreter, and Sunday school teacher. Oh, yeah, I’ve also worked with computers.

While my first keyboard was an IBMs electric, and my first digital experience was on an Atari 400, my professional work in tech started in 1989 (when you got Windows 286 for free on twelve 5¼” when you bought Excel 1.0). Since then I’ve worked as a classroom instructor, courseware designer, helpdesk operator, desktop support staff, sysadmin, network engineer, and software distribution technician.

Then, about 25 years ago, I got involved with monitoring. I’ve worked with a wide range of tools: Tivoli, BMC, OpenView, janky perl scripts, Nagios, SolarWinds, DOS batch files, Zabbix, Grafana, New Relic, and other assorted nightmare fuel. I’ve designed solutions for companies that were modest (~10 systems), significant (5,000 systems), and ludicrous (250,000 systems). In that time, I’ve learned a lot about monitoring and observability in all its many and splendid forms.