Fluentd + Kibana: A Solid Pair for Logs That Actually Tell You Something Log pipelines often start small — a few apps, a file or two. Then it snowballs. Suddenly there are containers, microservices, hybrid networks, and logs coming from every direction. That’s when a combo like Fluentd and Kibana starts pulling its weight. Fluentd is the collector and dispatcher. It doesn’t care where logs come from — files, syslog, containers, cloud agents — it grabs everything, processes it, and hands it off.

Shinken: A Modern Take on Nagios That Still Plays by Sysadmin Rules Shinken doesn’t try to reinvent monitoring from scratch. Instead, it takes everything Nagios got right — plugin checks, simple configs, host/service separation — and reimagines it with a more flexible, modern core. Written in Python, modular by design, and much easier to scale than classic Nagios, Shinken feels like what Nagios could have become if it had evolved. For sysadmins who still prefer flat config files and plugin-based

VictoriaMetrics: Time Series That Scale Without Fuss Time-series databases tend to fall into two camps: easy but fragile, or fast but nightmarishly complex. VictoriaMetrics walks right between — it’s surprisingly simple to deploy, handles huge volumes of metrics, and just… works. No cluster gymnastics, no Kafka layers, no obscure tuning rituals. Whether you’re pulling in Prometheus data, Telegraf, Graphite, or your own custom metrics — VictoriaMetrics stores it in a compact format, indexes it sm

LibreNMS: SNMP Monitoring That’s Just… Practical Let’s be honest: SNMP monitoring isn’t sexy. But it’s necessary — and LibreNMS handles it without getting in the way. It doesn’t pretend to be a full-stack observability suite. It just keeps an eye on your routers, switches, firewalls, and servers — and tells you when something smells off. No license keys. No secret paywalls. Just plain, useful, solid network monitoring. And it does more than people expect.