There are few things that make us as proud as when we see a great use for BlinkyTape out in the wild. So you can imagine our delight when we saw a tweet about this blog post on the “Engine Room” blog by the Financial Times.

If you’ve ever been tasked with keeping an eye on a bunch of servers running in a far-off colocation facility, you know that it’s all about the tools. And – get this! – some clever sysadmins at FT have used BlinkyTape to streamline their server monitoring.

They’ve engineered a Raspberry Pi-based system that runs a python script translating their servers’ status into friendly colored lights! While a blinking red light won’t tell you what is wrong, it’ll tell you when something is up in a very obvious way. This should go a long way towards avoiding every sysadmin’s worst fear: not knowing the server has been down for awhile.

If I ever have another server-tending gig, I’ll definitely be building something very similar. Bravo, Silvano!