Charge-posting watchdog
A small daemon plus a few Slack hooks that quietly saves the operations team about 150 hours a year. The kind of project nobody asks for but everybody misses once it's gone.
- Role
- Engineer
- Timeline
- Mar 2023 (a long weekend)
- Stack
- Node, Slack API, Papertrail
- Tags
- Tooling
§Context
Once a day, somebody on Ops would manually walk a checklist to confirm that a particular charge-posting job had run cleanly. It took about thirty minutes, and sometimes the answer was "call the engineer."
§What I did
Wrote a small daemon that watches the relevant logs, posts a green/red summary into a Slack channel each morning, and pings the on-call only if something is actually broken. Boring tech, end to end.
§Outcome
Roughly 150 hours of human attention reclaimed every year. The job has been quietly running for two years and nobody has filed a ticket about it, which is the highest praise an internal tool can receive.