Frigga Blogs

A bug came in on something I'd written. My name on the commit, my PR, merged and running for months. I opened the file and had no idea how it worked. Not a vague memory that needed refreshing. Genuinely blank. I'd reviewed that code, I'…

An alert fires. Checkout latency, p95, over threshold. What you have been handed is a pod name and a number. What you need is a function in a file in a repository, changed by a commit, shipped by a deployment, roughly forty minutes ago. Between th…

Somebody asks how order creation works. You open the order service and start reading. POST /orders → OrderController.create() → OrderService.submit() → orders table → publish("order.created") And that's where the trail stops. Not bec…

A database gets slow. Not down, just slow enough that queries start timing out. The service in front of it retries. So does the service in front of that one. And the client. Nobody coordinated this, they are all just doing the sensible thing, whic…

There's a category of outage that makes you doubt your monitoring. Error rate is through the roof. Requests are timing out. And every panel you open looks fine. CPU is low. Memory is low. The database is up, responding, barely working at all. …

Every other failure in production arrives unannounced. A dependency falls over, a config change does something unexpected, traffic goes somewhere nobody modelled. Certificate expiry is not like that. The date is printed on the certificate. It has be…

Ask a founder what their engineering team needs and you'll usually get an answer about outages. Faster detection. Better alerting. Something that helps when things go wrong at two in the morning. That's fair. Outages are visible, they…