Best of Monitoring — October 2025

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   Article

   The Verdict·30w

   ctop = htop for containers

   ctop is a terminal-based monitoring tool for Docker containers, inspired by htop. It provides a clean visual interface to check container statistics, access logs, and customize display columns directly from the command line.

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2. 2
   Article

   Hacker News·31w

   Comparing the power consumption of a 30 year old refrigerator to a brand new one

   A comparison of power consumption between a 30-year-old UPO Jääkarhu refrigerator and a modern replacement using smart plug monitoring. The old unit consumed 2.6 kWh daily versus 0.7 kWh for the new one—a 3.7x difference. Monthly savings of approximately 57 kWh translate to a payback period of about 38 months at 17 cents per kWh. The analysis demonstrates practical IoT monitoring applications for home energy optimization and appliance replacement decisions.

   51

   5
3. 3
   Article

   Charity·30w

   The Pillar Is A Lie

   A critical examination of the "three pillars of observability" (metrics, logs, traces) framework, arguing it's primarily a marketing construct that leads to expensive, siloed tooling. The piece advocates for unified storage models (observability 2.0) that treat all telemetry signals as interconnected structured data, eliminating the need to hop between separate systems. It clarifies that OpenTelemetry uses "signals" as the technical term, not "pillars," and explains how modern observability tools can store data once while deriving multiple signal types from the same source, reducing costs and cognitive load.

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