Observations from production.

Why does the cat always sit on the keyboard?

The obvious explanation is warmth. The more likely explanation is attention. A laptop is a device that takes the human away from the cat, so the cat takes the laptop away from the human.

From an operational perspective this is a denial-of-service attack with excellent timing.

The 03:17 server outage

The server became unreachable at 03:17. The first investigation found no network fault, no disk failure and no unusual CPU load.

A second investigation found a cat sleeping on the network cable. Service was restored immediately after the cat was relocated.

Root cause: insufficient cable routing discipline.

Monitoring the cat

Traditional monitoring systems measure CPU, memory, disk and network traffic. Cats require a different set of metrics.

Recommended metrics include:

• hours slept per day;
• number of meals requested;
• unexpected midnight activity;
• distance to the nearest keyboard;
• probability of knocking something off a table.