The Pulsetic blog

Practical guides on uptime, monitoring, SSL, status pages and keeping a website online, from the team that builds the tools.

Reference
The ping Command: Reading Every Line of the Output

What every line of ping output means: icmp_seq, ttl, time, packet loss and the rtt min/avg/max/mdev summary, plus the flags Windows and Linux read differently.
25 August 2026
Guides
Runbooks: How to Write One That Works at 3am

What a runbook is, how it differs from a playbook, and the six-part structure that survives real use: trigger, verification, decision points, exact commands, rollback and a timed escalation.
25 August 2026
Reference
Service Degradation: What It Means and How to Detect It

Service degradation is partial failure: slow, intermittent or incomplete rather than down. Why up/down checks report it as healthy, and the four signals that actually catch it.
25 August 2026
Guides
API Testing Strategies: What to Test, and How Often

A practical API testing strategy: the five layers, what belongs in each, how often each should run, and the exact point where testing stops being useful and production monitoring takes over.
25 August 2026
Reference
High Cardinality: Why Your Metrics Bill Exploded

High cardinality explained: how one label multiplies into millions of time series, what it costs on Grafana Cloud, Datadog and New Relic, and the relabelling and native-histogram fixes that stop it.
25 August 2026
Guides
Maintenance Messages: Templates, and When to Send Them

Copy-paste maintenance message templates for customer-facing notices, plus what 841 real status-page updates show about how long companies give and how often they ship the default wording unedited.
25 August 2026
Guides
Java Cron Jobs: Spring, Quartz and Plain Cron

How to schedule work in Java. Spring @Scheduled uses six cron fields, Quartz uses six or seven with different day-of-week numbering, and both trip people who paste in a Unix expression.
5 August 2026
Guides
Kubernetes CronJob: A Practical Guide

How Kubernetes CronJob works: the manifest, timeZone, concurrencyPolicy, history limits, running one manually, and the missed-schedule trap that stops jobs entirely.
3 August 2026
Guides
PHP Cron Jobs: The Practical Guide

How to run PHP scripts from cron, why the CLI uses a different php.ini, the single Laravel scheduler entry, and why WP-Cron is not really cron.
29 July 2026
Guides
Python Cron Jobs: Scheduling Scripts That Actually Run

How to run a Python script from cron, including virtualenvs, unbuffered output and logging. Plus when to use APScheduler or Celery beat instead.
24 July 2026
Guides
Cron Job Not Running? Work Through This Checklist

A cron job that works in your terminal but not from cron is nearly always the environment. Work through the daemon, the schedule, PATH, permissions and output in order.
21 July 2026
Guides
Where Are Cron Logs Stored?

Cron logs live in /var/log/syslog on Debian and Ubuntu, /var/log/cron on RHEL and Fedora. Where to find them, what they do and do not record, and how to capture job output properly.
15 July 2026
Reference
What Is a Cron Job? The Complete Guide

A cron job runs a command automatically on a schedule. The five-field syntax explained, copy-paste examples, the gotchas that break jobs, and how to know when one stops running.
9 July 2026
Guides
SSL Certificate Expiry Monitoring: The 30/15/7-Day Alert Rule

How to monitor SSL certificate expiry so a lapsed cert never takes your website down. The 30/15/7-day alert rule, what else to watch, and how to set it up.
30 June 2026
Guides
Synthetic Monitoring vs Real User Monitoring: Which Do You Need?

Synthetic monitoring vs real user monitoring (RUM): what each one measures, where each wins, and why most teams run both. A plain-English comparison.
30 June 2026
Reference
What Does 99.9% Uptime Actually Mean? (The Nines, Explained)

99.9% uptime allows about 43 minutes of downtime a month. Here is what every "nine" means in real minutes, how to calculate uptime, and why 99.99% is far harder.
30 June 2026

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