The Google Cloud Team posted a fun poem for all of us techno nerds. “2016 is winding down, and we wanted to take this chance to thank you, our loyal readers, and wish you happy holidays,” wrote Alex Barrett, Editor of the Google Cloud Platform Blog. “As a little gift to you, here’s a poem, courtesy of Mary Koes, a product manager on the Stackdriver team channeling the Clement Clarke Moore classic.”

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the Cloud
Not a creature was deploying; it wasn’t allowed.
The servers were all hosted in GCP or AWS
And Stackdriver was monitoring them so no one was stressed.

The engineers were nestled all snug in their beds
While visions of dashboards danced in their heads.
When then from my nightstand, there arose such a clatter,
I silenced my phone and checked what was the matter.

Elevated error rates and latency through the roof?
At this rate our error budget soon would go poof!
The Director OOO, the CTO on vacation,
Who would I find still manning their workstation?

Dutifully, I opened the incident channel on Slack
And couldn’t believe when someone answered back.
SClaus was the user name of this tireless engineer.
I wasn’t aware that this guy even worked here.

He wrote, “Wait while I check your Stackdriver yule Logs . . .
Yep, it seems the errors are all coming from your blogs.”
Then in Error Reporting, he found the root cause
“Quota is updated. All fixed. :-)” typed SClaus.

Who this merry DevOps elf was, I never shall know.
For before we did our postmortem, away did he go.
Just before vanishing, he took time to write,
“Merry monitoring to all and to all a silent night!”
Happy holidays everyone, and see you in 2017!