Blog/Author/Ethan Walker

Ethan Walker

Senior Systems Reliability Engineer focused on uptime, incident response, and building monitoring systems that surface problems before users notice.

Reliability & Uptime

What Actually Causes Downtime in Modern Web Applications

Downtime in modern web applications is rarely caused by a single failure. In practice, outages usually happen because multiple small issues align across multiple layers.

Feb 28

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3 min read

What Actually Causes Downtime in Modern Web Applications

SSL, Domains & Trust

Postmortem: When Expired Certificates Take Down Global Infrastructure

A technical analysis of how major companies still suffer devastating outages due to missed certificate renewals and internal monitoring gaps.

Mar 15

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3 min read

Postmortem: When Expired Certificates Take Down Global Infrastructure

SSL, Domains & Trust

Why Wildcard Certificates Hide Production Failures

Wildcard certificates are convenient but create massive blast zones. Learn how an expiring wildcard takes down dozens of subdomains simultaneously.

Mar 15

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4 min read

Why Wildcard Certificates Hide Production Failures

SSL, Domains & Trust

The Complete Guide to Automated SSL Certificate Monitoring

A comprehensive guide to TLS lifecycles, common expiration failures, and how to implement robust synthetic monitoring to catch certificate issues.

Mar 15

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5 min read

The Complete Guide to Automated SSL Certificate Monitoring

DNS & Networking

Best DNS Monitoring Tools for Infrastructure Teams

Stop trusting internal metrics for external outages. Learn the architectural principles of outside-in DNS synthetic monitoring for SRE teams.

Mar 8

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3 min read

Best DNS Monitoring Tools for Infrastructure Teams

DNS & Networking

How to Monitor DNS Resolution Latency

DNS latency happens before your app logs a single request. Learn how Anycast routing fails and how to measure true P99 lookup times from the edge.

Mar 8

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3 min read

DNS & Networking

DNS TTL Best Practices for Production Systems

Setting a DNS TTL too high can cause 24-hour outages, while setting it too low can DDoS your nameservers. Learn the best practices for production TTL management.

Mar 8

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3 min read

DNS TTL Best Practices for Production Systems

DNS & Networking

Complete Guide to DNS Monitoring: Prevent Downtime and Detect Failures

DNS failures are a massive blind spot for most SRE teams. Learn the failure modes, debugging workflows, and monitoring strategies to prevent silent downtime.

Mar 8

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6 min read

Complete Guide to DNS Monitoring: Prevent Downtime and Detect Failures