LPWAN (Low Power Wide Area Network), also known as LPWA or LPN, is a wireless data transport protocol that is now understood as one of the basic protocols for the implementation of IoT. In order to have a better idea of the relevance of LPWAN we can consider the prediction made by statisca.com of a steady increase in the number of LPWAN devices connected around the world, expecting this number to reach around 3.5 billion devices by 2021.

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that although collecting and reviewing metrics and logs is a core part of running a stable and successful service, access to raw events and the ability to search and pivot on any dimension of your production environment, no matter how high-cardinality, is what will help your team debug and troubleshoot new problems and outages more quickly.

Nowadays, we need to pay for almost every service we use. Starting with our operating systems, antivirus software, for which we need to pay for a license to use. Also, if we wish to use various online services, we need to register an account on their website. Furthermore, we need to pay to be able to use the service entirely.

“I need to be notified if there’s a significant event ongoing with SignalFx.” This is what I tell my team. However, despite being the CTO of a monitoring company, creating the right set of alerts for me to stay informed of incidents in progress or potential issues was harder than it seemed at first glance. Why?

The pressure in the natural gas pipelines under three Massachusetts communities spiked to 12 times their normal level last week, just before the explosions and fires that destroyed dozens of homes and killed an 18-year-old man. Columbia Gas went under fire for their mismanagement of the incident. The NTSB says a Columbia Gas control room in Columbus, Ohio, registered pressures of 6 pounds per square inch last Thursday in pipelines that are intended to carry just 0.5 PSI.

Gift of Hope Organ & Tissue Donor Network is a non-profit organ procurement organization that coordinates organ and tissue donation and provides public education on donation in Illinois and northwest Indiana. As one of 58 OPOs that make up the nation’s donation system, Gift of Hope works with 180 hospitals and serves 12 million people in their donation service area.

In my previous post, I talked about the real costs of alert fatigue — the toll it can take on your engineers as well as your business — and some suggestions for rethinking alerting. In part 2 of this series, I’ll share some best practices for fine-tuning Sensu to help reduce alert fatigue.