My Toolbox
I have spent most of my life surrounded by tools. Physical ones, digital ones, some I built myself, some I borrowed, and a few that should have been retired a decade ago but still work because I know exactly how to hit them with the right command. What I have learned over twenty-four years in telecom is that the right tools are not just utilities. They are extensions of how you think.
The stack I use today did not come from a vendor roadmap or a course syllabus. It came from years of building things that had to work, survive, and make sense under pressure. Every piece of it has a reason to exist. It is not about trends. It is about trust.
Linux – The Ground Beneath Everything
I run Linux because it does not lie to me. It does not hide what it is doing. It does not reboot itself for “my convenience.” It simply runs. You can pull it apart, see the logic, and understand the sequence of events that led to any state.
In a field where uptime is currency and mystery is failure, I cannot afford to run something that treats me like a guest in my own machine. Linux lets me work close to the metal, to feel the heartbeat of the system, not just the interface on top of it. It is the quiet hum that everything else in my world stands on.
OpenSearch – The Core of Memory
OpenSearch is not just my database or dashboard engine. It is the memory of my entire operation. I have worked with Elastic and OpenSearch since around 2016, and what I learned is that speed, scale, and clarity mean nothing if you cannot trust the shape of your data.
I use OpenSearch because I can. Because it is open, predictable, and does not decide what I am allowed to see. It indexes everything, speaks fluently in time, and does not forget. When I look at a dataset from months ago, it should look the same as it did then, with every field still connected to its lineage. That kind of honesty in data is rare.
I do not run it because it is trendy. I run it because I know it will still be telling the truth long after the marketing slides have faded.
MariaDB – The Anchor
Every system needs an anchor, a place for data that does not drift. OpenSearch may be my dynamic memory, but MariaDB holds the static truths. Customer records, service addresses, topology maps, and reference tables that do not change unless I change them.
There is comfort in SQL. You can reason about it, trace it, and know exactly what a query is doing before you run it. It is the calm voice in a storm of JSON. I use it when I need reliability, precision, and something that will never pretend to be smarter than it is.
Logstash – The Old Workhorse
Logstash is not the fastest tool in the shed, but it is still one of the most dependable. It takes chaos and turns it into structure. It can take the weirdest logs from the weirdest devices and make sense of them. I can write Grok filters in my sleep, and sometimes I do.
People have told me there are newer, sleeker options. Maybe. But I know how this one behaves under load, how it fails, and how to make it recover. It has been around long enough to earn its place. When I drop a new feed into the pipeline, I know exactly what will happen. There is something to be said for an old tool that still gets the job done.
Grafana – The EKG
Grafana is where the data breathes. It is the pulse monitor of the system. When something drifts, spikes, or simply feels off, Grafana is the first place I look.
I do not use it because of pretty graphs or corporate dashboards. I use it because it shows me the rhythm of the network in real time. It is how I see when a problem is just noise, or when the heartbeat is skipping for a reason.
Grafana does not reason. It reflects. It is not the mind of the system, it is its vital signs. And when I have built a good dashboard, I can see the health of the entire operation in a single glance.
Go – The Precision Tool
Go is where my logic lives. It is fast, clean, and predictable. It does not hide behind abstraction or surprise me with behavior I did not ask for. When I write pollers, enrichers, or middleware in Go, I know exactly what is happening down to the byte.
It gives me confidence. It compiles into small, self-contained binaries that I can drop anywhere. It is elegant in its simplicity. Go is not the flashiest language, but it is one of the most honest. It rewards thoughtfulness and punishes chaos, just like networks do.
Perl – The Swiss Army Chainsaw
Ah, Perl. The language that refuses to die, and honestly, I hope it never does. Perl is like that stubborn old technician who knows every backdoor, every undocumented command, and exactly which piece of equipment needs a kick instead of a reboot.
When a piece of logic refuses to pin down, I pull out Perl. Sometimes I just need to grab a text file by the throat and make it talk. Perl does that. It might not be pretty, but it is fast, effective, and completely loyal to the person wielding it.
I have built systems in it, scraped data from places it was never meant to leave, and stitched entire processes together with nothing more than a few regular expressions and a bad sense of humor. It is the tool I keep in the back of the drawer for emergencies, and it still saves the day more often than I would like to admit.
ZFS – The Memory That Does Not Forget
When you work with as much data as I do, backups are not optional, and corruption is not an acceptable risk. ZFS gives me the peace of mind that everything I have built can be rolled back, cloned, or snapshotted in seconds.
It is not just storage, it is assurance. Every bit of the intelligence layer depends on being able to trust that yesterday’s data is still valid today. ZFS gives me that trust. It is the kind of technology that quietly makes everything else possible.
React + Tailwind – The Face of the Machine (Coming Soon)
On the roadmap is a new interface built with React, Tailwind, and Vite. It is not running yet, but it will be built step by step through this series as the system grows.
The goal is not flash or animation. It is clarity and speed. The people who use my tools are operators, and they need information, not decoration. React will handle the interaction, Tailwind will keep the design uniform, and together they will give the intelligence layer a clean, fast face that can keep up with the human behind the keyboard.
Why These Tools Matter
Every tool in this kit earned its place the hard way. Not because it was fashionable, but because it worked when it mattered. They are not pieces of a tech stack; they are a philosophy of control, transparency, and resilience.
These are the core components I rely on most, but they are not all the tools I use. If I find something that does a job better, I will use it. If I need to write a new tool that fits my data more precisely, I will do that too. The point is not loyalty to any single language or platform. The point is using the right tool for the problem, and understanding why it works.
The real intelligence in operations does not come from machine learning or vendor dashboards. It comes from humans who understand how their tools think, who can trace a problem down to its root without being distracted by noise.
My toolbox is built for that kind of work. Each piece is a lens that helps me see the system more clearly. Together, they form the foundation of what I call The Intelligence Layer, a way of making sense of modern networks without surrendering to them.
Stay tuned for the next article, “OpenSearch – The Core of My Tool Belt,” where I will explore how this engine became the heart of everything I build, and why I trust it to hold the memory of my systems.
--If You're Not First, You're Last (Maybe)
-Bryan