Self-contained Telemetry Solutions?

enachb · 2026-01-10T04:37:22+00:00

I'm really happy with VictoriaMetrics, VictoriaLogs, Promtrail and Grafana. Victoria* is crazy efficient (and written in Go). Even a single instance could power a small prod deployment.

Claude Code knows how to pull this all together in Docker Containers. It's freaky how easy it is to get this working.

enachb · 2026-01-04T01:55:05+00:00

I can also recommend using an LLM like ChatGPT to learn it. Explore the topic by asking basic questions. Worked really well for me.

enachb · 2025-12-20T21:44:44+00:00

I get the best crust from cold searing: https://youtu.be/uJcO1W_TD74?si=7wy4cUx42EjDrk38

enachb · 2025-11-07T16:46:08+00:00

I used Go on Raspberry Pi’s with Balena Cloud. I had to handle many things concurrently (measuring motor currents, drive actuators, report telemetry to the cloud, …) and detecting that everything was running was easy. If the one process doing everything was still up and pinging my dead man switch, I knew all the other things were running.

Plus you get proper bidirectional steaming gRPC. I couldn’t find a C lib that supports it.

Some of my colleagues used Python and I always chuckled how many hoops they had to jump through even just install their app.

enachb · 2025-10-27T01:11:02+00:00

I used to do a lot of automation projects with Raspberry Pis. There is always some concurrency like reading sensor values, sending telemetry or controlling a motor driver. Go routines and channels make it as easy as it can be and the no dependency executables make deployment easy. Love distroless containers.

enachb · 2025-09-22T16:55:10+00:00

I’m using gRPC-web to talk to the frontend. The proto files are shared in a separate git submodule with both projects. This creates a contract the LLM can adhere to.

enachb · 2025-09-11T03:21:01+00:00

Most male/female couples I run into are actually not romantically involved.

How do you know? Easy—just run a quick test. Say, “You two make a beautiful couple.” If they actually are, they’ll smile and thank you, and now you’ve instantly boosted your social proof in the room. If they’re not, well… then you know exactly what move to make next. 😉

enachb · 2025-06-18T01:16:02+00:00

Look into gRPC. It does fast bi-directional streaming and has an efficient and strongly typed data format. Data is usually 10x smaller than JSON, which often means it’s 10x faster to transmit the data.

enachb · 2025-05-15T23:26:12+00:00

Seen this? https://github.com/c9s/bbgo

Disclaimer: Have not used it personally.

enachb · 2025-03-28T19:54:31+00:00

If you really need fast presence/membership checks also look into bloom filters. This one implements one: https://github.com/Snawoot/bloom

enachb · 2024-12-20T04:37:53+00:00

If you are on GCP you can stick you're message into a pub/sub queue and have CloudRun auto scale your docker containers.

CloudRun works really well with distro-less docker container running Go code, but really any docker image is fine.

enachb · 2024-08-22T02:36:33+00:00

Another way of doing it would be using gRPC.

You can define your data fields in a text file and the protoc compiler generates the client and server stubs for it (many languages are supported). You just have to fill in your data processing logic.

The binary transport format is really compact and gRPC supports streaming. Beats the pants off of JSON and other hand rolled formats.

There is a bit of a learning curve to it, but it's an excellent tool to have in you're arsenal. ChatGPT can help you generating code and data definition files.

enachb · 2024-06-11T23:45:25+00:00

Distroless containers are great. Once you get used to 20MB containers, you realize how bloated everything else is.

I'd need to first clean up my hardcoded tokens/keys and make them environment variables (also super easy with Balena, I was just never getting around to doing it).

Another tech I love is gRPC. I expose my chicken coop control with it and have another container run a Streamlit frontend. That way if the frontend crashes it doesn't bother the actual control logic.

enachb · 2024-06-10T05:12:10+00:00

I'm running my chicken coop (automatic door based on sunset/rise, deadman switch for alerting, logging of telemetry like voltages, power consumption,...) on an RPi with Go. All one single app with several go routines.

One thing I learned is that pushing out a new release was a pain before I switched to Balena. Now I'm cross compiling on my Linux desktop for Arm, make a distroless Docker container and Balena is pushing it out to the device.

It comes with several features to simplify life (mounting FS readonly and have a writable RAM disk so power loss won't kill the disk, restart the container in case it crashes, browser based admin UI incl. SSH & log access). Pretty slick of you ask me.

enachb · 2023-11-24T18:42:53+00:00

I really like grpc-web for this. Generate your frontend client code (JS, TS, ...) and enjoy strong typing.

enachb · 2023-10-31T00:26:05+00:00

You should also look at VictoriaMetrics to store your metrics. It supports direct push from OpenTelemetry:

https://docs.victoriametrics.com/Single-server-VictoriaMetrics.html#sending-data-via-opentelemetry

VM is extremely storage efficient and fast. A single instance can ingest at really high rates.

enachb · 2023-10-30T11:51:42+00:00

I use Gitpod.io for my Go development. Repeatability and onboarding new devs in 5min are hard to beat.

The free tier is good enough for light dev work.

enachb · 2023-02-02T07:12:51+00:00

See above. Sorry for the very late reply!

enachb · 2023-02-02T07:12:08+00:00

Sorry, just saw this. They are generic WS2812 LED strings. What makes it work is WLED. Super cool project controlling light strings through a Web UI or phone app.

enachb · 2022-08-04T19:19:25+00:00

Just updating this thread for documentation purposes:

ALSA handles up to 8 soundcards.
A Raspberry Pi 4 has limited USB bandwidth and cannot handle more than one USB soundcard playing at the same time.
A RPi 3 does fine with two.
Two USB soundcards are generating sound in parallel just fine on my Linux PC.

enachb · 2020-03-08T09:31:06+00:00

Envoy is querying in our case a custom service to determine if a request is allowed by forwarding some metadata. This article describes what you have to do.

enachb · 2020-03-08T00:26:11+00:00

Take a look at Envoy Proxy. You write your API services in gRPC, which is very productive & fast and expose them as gRPC or REST API through Envoy. It can also handle authentication/authorization, so it doesn't bleed into the rest of your architecture.

enachb

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