I have recently acquired two solar panels from Sunology advertising a cumulated instantaneous production of up to 810W. The panels come with a smart plug emitting the data to Tuya, in order to retain and graph historical data. However, the only available granuarity for that data is daily kWh production. In order to optimize the orientation and placement of the panels, as well as measure the production efficiency (power produced / 810 * 100), I needed a much finer granularity than that. I decided to query the data myself and send it to Datadog.

Last month, Ardèche experienced very heavy precipitations in the span of couple of hours. As a result, the dam located upriver from me opened the floodgates (literally), which caused the Chassezac level to raise by about 6.5m in about 1.5h. I've setup some monitoring using Datadog and Pagerduty to make sure I know about it as soon as possible.

I recently realized that I was routinely managing thousands of servers and petabytes of data in my daily job, but was still managing my own personal infrastructure like I was living in 1999.

With the advent of configuration management tools such as Ansible, Chef, and the like, it became easier …