Unified Alerting in Grafana: Codifying Your Monitoring Stack with Helm and GitFlow

Infrastructure has shifted. You don’t manually click your way to production anymore—everything’s code. But somehow, alerting often lags behind. Grafana’s Unified Alerting model, introduced in version 8, changes that. Now, with proper use of values.yaml and Helm, you can manage alert rules, routing logic, contact points, and data sources like you would any other critical system component: version-controlled, peer-reviewed, and auto-deployed.

This post walks through how to declaratively manage your entire Grafana alerting pipeline with Helm—tying it into a GitFlow CI/CD strategy to lock in reliability, reproducibility, and observability from day one.

Automating AWS Cost Retrieval Using Python and Boto3

Effectively managing AWS costs demands accurate and timely data. Python, combined with AWS’s powerful boto3 library, makes it straightforward to programmatically access up-to-date pricing data directly from AWS. Below you'll find a clear, practical guide on retrieving AWS service pricing, with Amazon EBS snapshot costs provided as an illustrative example.

Grafana and Prometheus: Why Prometheus and Grafana and how to install it.

Grafana is an open-source platform used for monitoring, visualization, and alerting on metrics and log data. It allows users to create interactive and customizable dashboards that integrate data from various sources, such as Prometheus, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch, and many others. Grafana is widely recognized for its powerful visualization capabilities, enabling teams to gain real-time insights into the performance and health of their systems.

Sending Automated AWS Findings to Microsoft Teams Using Python

In fast-moving DevOps and FinOps environments, it’s easy to lose track of stopped or non-compliant cloud resources. While Lambda or cron jobs can detect these resources, what matters just as much is where those results go. I don’t want alerts buried in email or tucked away in an S3 bucket—I want actionable messages delivered straight to my team’s Microsoft Teams channel.

This post focuses specifically on using Python to craft and send structured messages to Microsoft Teams using an Incoming Webhook.

FinOps, The next step in "operational" development

In several of my recent posts, I’ve discussed using Lambda scripting to identify and clean up unused resources in AWS environments. While these tasks traditionally fell under DevOps, they are now part of a broader discipline known as FinOps. Short for Financial Operations, FinOps merges financial management with operational efficiencies to maximize the value organizations derive from cloud computing.

Although the FinOps Foundation formally established the concept in 2019, its principles date back to the early 2010s. During this time, businesses began focusing on managing cloud costs as the shift from capital expenditure (CapEx) to operational expenditure (OpEx) models made cost efficiency a priority.