- Chef Jon Cowie is a chef at Etsy who manages their open source chef server and around 800 nodes
- They use chef handlers to send metrics and failure alerts to graphite and IRC to monitor chef runs
- Cowie emphasizes familiarity with their infrastructure, keeping things simple, using standards, and abstracting complexity when needed like with their syslog-ng refactor
- While automation helps, changes still occur and complete control cannot be assumed