I started my first full-time job almost three months ago, and I wanted to share what I got done in my first 30 days.

When I joined, there was no server monitoring at all, and the team had no idea what our infrastructure was actually doing in real time. By my second week I had set up collectd on every server, along with a central InfluxDB and Grafana server. We have tweaked it a bit since then, and now there is a TV in the office showing the whole team live usage.

Having that monitoring in place has already let us catch and fix problems before they turned into bigger ones.

The screenshot above is from Grafana during my third week. At about 11am we pushed code that included a bunch of performance improvements I had made to our application. At first we thought something had broken, because none of us expected my changes to make that big of a difference. Needless to say, I was pretty excited to have made that kind of impact so early.

I have made a lot more progress since then, and I don’t plan on slowing down anytime soon.