It’s close on a quarter century that I worked for a company which had deployed a humongous issue-and-everything tracking system employees detested using. I can’t remember the name of the product, but the vendor’s name had the letters ‘P’ and ‘H’ in it. I worked with a team which flat-out refused to use the product, so I went in search of something we wouldn’t hate too much.

I found mantis, at the time a relatively simple tool, and it worked with Apache and PHP which we had an abundance of so we gave it a try. It’s almost needless to say that the whole company abandoned the awful tool and settled on the much simpler mantis within just a few months. It had its issues (pun not necessarily intended), but it worked.

One thing I’ve always thought missing in the combination of monitoring software and issue trackers is to be able to have a system which raises an issue and adds information about what that system actually is and how to operate it. Say I’m monitoring a Web server and the monitoring system detects an anomaly, it should open an issue and say what the current situation is. Simultaneously, though, I want it to log what a possible resolution is, for instance in it sending along a link to the documentation, etc.

That was one of the modifications I applied at the time to our Nagios installation. When it detected an anomaly, it used the combination of host / service (IIRC) to pick up a text file, the content of which it added to the ticket it created in mantis.

This is something I do even today. I try to automate when it seems reasonable to me to do so, but there are still tasks which I schedule to run from cron. These then send me an email to which I must react.

One example is issuance of a Let’s Encrypt TLS certificate which I run locally using ACME dns-01 challenge. When the certificate for the remote server is issued I get an email with an attachment:

From: ACME Lego <jp>
Date: Fri, 05 Jul 2024 07:46:04 +0200
Subject: ACME renewal for *.example.com

Certificate for *.example.com renewed and attached. Run

     to acme-example-wild; make push

If doing this manually, SFTP to bla and

put *.example.com.crt dump/
chmod 644 dump/*.crt

It’s primitive, but it helps me: I don’t have to try remembering what to do when I get the email, as the instructions are right there for copy/pasting. And should I have to delegate this at some point the instructions for the next person are right there, every 60 days.

Could I automate this? Yes, I could, but in this particular case it’s not worth my while, and I want to know when it happened anyway, i.e. I want the email notification.