About Us

Note from the operator

I work in the Chinese internet industry as an ops engineer, with experience in networking, systems engineering, monitoring, containers, and so on. Back in the early days, people liked to call us “network admins” — a nickname borrowed (half-jokingly) from the internet café era, when the “tech guy’s” solution to everything was just to reboot the computer. Nowadays, the word “operations” shows up everywhere on the street: elevator ops, power grid ops, heating system ops, you name it. Around 2010, as internet companies exploded in number, new titles like Operations Engineer, Linux System Engineer, Cloud Platform Ops, and Ops Developer started appearing. In the past few years, we’ve even become kind of trendy. We brought in official DevOps concepts and adapted them to local culture — let’s call it “localization,” where the outside looks the same but the inside works in a locally practical way. Google’s SRE culture has also made its way in, though again, usually adapted to fit how things work here. As for this site: it’s an sidecar monitoring tool. It reflects issues from the side, works in most situations, and doesn’t require you to integrate anything. It’s super easy to use, and most of the time, it’s completely free. If you’d like to support us: the simplest way is to add a link to our site on your own website, or recommend us on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. Or hey — you can always buy us a coffee. :-)