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Maria Baptista
Maria Baptista

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🚫 No Internet, No Cloud, No Problem: Building Monitoring Systems That Survive Offline (From Angola)

When you think about monitoring infrastructure, what comes to mind?

Maybe dashboards in Grafana, real-time alerts from Prometheus, centralized logs, and seamless cloud connectivity across AWS or GCP...

Well, none of that works here.

🌍 Where I Come From

I’m Maria, a self-taught observability engineer from 🇦🇴 Angola — a beautiful country with brilliant people and… unstable infrastructure.

Here, it’s normal to:

  • Lose internet multiple times a day
  • Have speeds under 1 Mbps
  • See power cuts without warning
  • Rely on SMS instead of Slack

But guess what? We still have systems to monitor. Critical alerts still matter. And that’s exactly why I started building my own solution.

The Problem

Traditional observability tools are powerful — but they assume:

  • High uptime
  • Fast internet
  • Access to the cloud

None of those assumptions hold true in large parts of Africa, South America, and Asia. And most engineers in Silicon Valley don’t even realize it.

I needed something different. Something local-first, resilient, and cloud-optional.

🔧 Meet Kuze Alert Monitoring for the Real World

Kuze Alert is my open-source project designed to monitor systems in the harshest, most unreliable environments.

It’s not just another tool. It’s a survival kit for devs like me who work under conditions where “just push to the cloud” doesn’t work.

🧠 Key Features:

  • ✅ Offline-first alert generation
  • ✅ Works on cheap hardware
  • ✅ Sends alerts via SMS or local radio
  • ✅ Compresses and syncs data when internet returns
  • ✅ Integrates with Prometheus locally

I’m currently building it in Go, using Prometheus and edge storage (SQLite/in-memory).

Soon, it will support push/pull sync and even visual dashboards — without internet.

📡 Real-World Scenario

Imagine a small ISP in Luanda that monitors routers in 3 provinces. The internet drops at night — every night.

With Kuze Alert:

  • Metrics are collected locally
  • Alerts are fired even offline
  • Critical events are cached and sent when possible

That’s observability that respects your reality.

💡 Why This Matters (and Not Just to Me)

  • Over 3.5 billion people live with unstable internet
  • Cloud-first tools leave these people behind
  • Most “global” tools break outside high-income regions

I’m building something different. Something grounded. Something I wish someone had built for me.

👩🏽‍💻 Who I Am (and Why I’m Writing This)

I’m 18. I’m self-taught. I’ve been building systems since I was more younger.

I created this article because I recently discovered the Dev.to community — and I’m absolutely LOVING the energy here.

The people, the projects, the passion — it’s inspiring.

I’m learning more every day, and I finally feel like I’ve found my tech family.

🔗 Follow My Journey

I'm sharing everything I learn while building Kuze Alert, contributing to open source, and growing from Angola to the world.

If you’re working with observability, edge computing, or cloud-native systems, let’s connect (some other IT area, would be a pleasure too).

If you’ve ever built tech in low-resource environments, I want to hear your story.

And if this article resonated with you — react, share, or comment.

It helps me grow, and helps this message reach the people who need it most.

✊🏽 Let’s Build a Truly Global Stack

  • One that works offline.
  • One that’s resilient.
  • One that doesn’t leave half the world behind.

Join me. ⭐ Star my GitHub. 💬 Leave your thoughts. 📣 Share this post.

Observability #Monitoring #AfricaTech #OpenSource #DevOps #Prometheus #Grafana #KuzeAlert #EdgeComputing #SelfTaught

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