The seven signals that actually page someone
Out of 142 metrics our average customer ships, only seven correlate with paid downtime. Here's how we found them and what we threw away.
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Issue 014 · May 2026
Quiet the edge.
Quiet the edge.
Trust the signal.
We monitor 64,000 distributed devices across 11 Canadian carriers. Most of what they emit is noise. We isolate the seven signals that actually wake someone up — and route them to the human who can act.
64,210+
Devices on stream
7
Signals per fleet
84ms
Median ingest
2021
Toronto, Ontario
A short manifesto
Most observability tools tell you everything is on fire, then leave you to guess which fire matters. We took the opposite bet — fewer dashboards, fewer charts, one page that says: this, right now, is what you need to read.
— Mara Quill & Devon Akinwale, founders
Recent dispatches
All issues →Field reports from the platform team. Practical, sometimes opinionated, never sponsored.
Why we shipped a Toronto region before Virginia
Latency to a Tim Hortons drive-thru kiosk in Brampton matters. Latency to a serverless test bench in us-east-1 — less so.
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A 19-second outage and what it cost us
Last quarter our ingest dropped for nineteen seconds. Here is the timeline, the root cause, and the fix we shipped on a Sunday afternoon.
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What we run on
A stack that fits on one whiteboard.
No service mesh you didn't ask for. No agent that updates itself at 3 a.m. and breaks your kiosk in Trois-Rivières. The whole thing is twelve binaries, four databases, and one rule: if a junior engineer can't draw it on Monday morning, we redesign it.
Below — the parts of the platform you'd actually be running, ranked by how often we've had to wake up for them.
01Edge collectorRust · 3.4 MB
02Ingest gatewayGo · multi-AZ
03Signal storeClickHouse · 90 d retention
04Anomaly enginePython · streaming
05ConsoleTypeScript · SvelteKit
Field notes.
A loose archive — short writeups from the on-call rotation. Updated when we have something honest to say.
№ 014
ToolingReplacing Grafana with a printed sheet of paper
May 02, 2026 № 013SREHow we trimmed pager volume by 71% in one quarter
Apr 14, 2026 № 012PostmortemThe bug that lived in the BIOS of a kiosk in Halifax
Mar 28, 2026 № 011EdgeNotes on shipping firmware to 64,000 boxes you cannot SSH into
Feb 19, 2026 № 010EngineeringWhy our ingest path is written in Rust and our anomaly engine isn't
Jan 30, 2026
Dispatches · monthly
One letter, second Tuesday of the month.
What we shipped, what we broke, what we'd do differently. About 1,400 ops engineers across Canada read it. No tracking pixels. No upsell.