This short story starts with an accidental discovery of how frequent Log4Shell attacks are executed against businesses and public internet services in general. During my daily work at Dynatrace I come to test a lot of software services along with closely observing those through the eyes of a monitoring platform vendor. I am running a […]
Renewable energy and intelligent management of private and industrial energy consumption are prominent topics today. In a recent post I did show how to use a DIY ESP8266 sensor in combination with Home Assistant in order to collect real time data about your energy consumption as well as about the amount of energy that you […]
Running Home Assistant Open Source home automation locally offers great advantages, such as optimizing your own energy usage or to simply automate boring and repetitive tasks. In case you own a Synology network disks, such as the Synology Diskmanager DS218+ you can directly run Docker containers on your local network disk and therefore also run […]
Observability and monitoring of software service infrastructure is the basis for modern Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and to successfully run and scale your IT infrastructure. As the digital transformation of business processes and the shift towards highly dynamic cloud infrastructures keeps on accelerating, the dependency on human operation teams poses a critical bottleneck. Especially with […]
In my recent blog on Open Source Home Energy Management with Home Assistant I wrote about how Home Assistant helps you to monitor and optimize your own home energy consumption. Within this blog post I will show how an ESP8266 Wifi enabled Siemens AMIS reader can be used to monitor the energy that your home […]
With the current war in Ukraine, energy prices surge to unbelievable heights. The European countries do rely on Russia’s cheap gas and oil for much too long a time. Even without the Russian war, it was pretty much clear for years that with the looming climate change there is no alternative as to completely switch […]
The widely popular ESP32 microcontroller board is a great choice for any hobbyist to build smart electronics and home automation sensors. The board’s powerful but low-cost design inspired millions of DIY enthusiasts and laid the ground for many great products, such as the Dynatrace DevOps UFO. Firmware software for ESP32 boards is mostly implemented by […]
You know that kind of public wlan hotspots at hotels, coffee shops or other businesses that offer wifi access but you need to accept their terms of service? The technique of offering a consensus Web page right when you initially connect to an open wifi is called a ‘captive portal’. A captive portal forces an […]
Last week I stumbled across a great opportunity that was announced within the Google Cloud Blog, which I am regularly scanning for latest GCP innovations. They offered a 30 days free subscription for their new Google Cloud Skill Boost learning platform, which I immediately accepted. Eager to deepen my existing knowledge on GCP cloud services, […]
Retrofitting existing electrical installations with some degree of additional home automation capabilities is a cumbersome activity. Most of the time, the fixed wired installations do not support adding the necessary home automation wires. Even if there is enough space for your home automation wires, the installation routes often do not end where your home automation […]