Mike Julian

Consultant & Author

About Me

Mike Julian headshot

Hi folks, I’m Mike. I’m the Founder/Chief Consultant at Aster Labs, a consultancy that helps companies improve their app & infrastructure monitoring. Before starting Aster Labs, I worked as an Operations Engineer/DevOps Engineer/Site Reliability Engineer. I do quite a few other things as well, which you can read about below.

Outside of clients and other work-related projects, I’m a wine and beer aficionado, having acquired my WSET Level 2 certification in Dec 2016 and Certified Beer Server certification in July 2017. I enjoy working on old cars (latest project: restoring a 1984 BMW 3 series) and traveling.

I’m originally from Knoxville, TN, though I spent many years in Phoenix, AZ. I currently reside in San Francisco, CA.

Featured In:

Current Work

Monitoring Weekly

Monitoring Weekly

Founder & Editor-in-Chief

(March 2017 -- Current)

A curated weekly email newsletter for all-things-monitoring. Stay up to date on monitoring without spending oodles on conferences and travel.

Aster Labs

Aster Labs

Founder

(October 2015 -- Current)

Sometimes you just need a little help. Leveraging my expertise in monitoring and observability, I help companies build better monitoring for their apps and infrastructure.

Practical Monitoring

Practical Monitoring

Author

(Released November 2017)

Do you have a nagging feeling that your monitoring needs improvement, but you just aren’t sure where to start or how to do it? Are you plagued by constant, meaningless alerts? Does your monitoring system routinely miss real problems? This is the book for you.

Freelance Camp

Freelance Camp

Advisor

(March 2017 -- Current)

A community of freelancers and consultants. Never feel alone again.

Felding Co

Felding Co

Advisor & Investor

(October 2017 -- Current)

Casual menswear shop carrying high-end heritage brands. Retail store in Knoxville, TN.

Past Work

Looking for employment history? Check my LinkedIn.
LOPSA-ETENN

LOPSA-ETENN

Co-founder/Co-organizer

(March 2012 -- February 2015)

The largest system administration meetup in East Tennessee and the largest LOPSA chapter ever at 50-60 attendees every month.

LOPSA

League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA)

Board of Directors

(June 2013 -- May 2014)

The League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) is a nonprofit corporation with members throughout the world. The mission is to advance the practice of system administration; to support, recognize, educate, and encourage its practitioners; and to serve the public through education and outreach on system administration issues.

Last Week in AWS

Last Week in AWS

Advisor

(March 2017 -- January 2018)

A weekly roundup of news from Amazon's cloud ecosystem - sprinkled with snark.

The Quinn Advisory Group

The Quinn Advisory Group

Advisor

(October 2016 -- January 2018)

Fix your horrifying AWS bills.

SF Metrics Meetup

SF Metrics Meetup

Co-organizer (speaker selection)

(April 2017 -- April 2018)

The oldest San Francisco-based monitoring meetup. I co-organize the meetup.