Buglyst Blog
Learn to debug under pressure.
Playbooks for fast pattern recognition, guides for the full investigation, and articles for the engineering judgment around the edges.
17 playbooks · 509 guides · 95 articles · 12 linked practice labs ·skip to practice
Fast pattern recognition for the production failures engineers see most often.
2 playbooks in Infrastructure & Cloud
Debugging Env Var Issues
A concise checklist for incidents where local works but CI, staging, or production changes behavior.
Debugging Deployment Config Bugs
How to debug incidents where the source is deployment wiring rather than application logic.
Structured investigations for the failure modes engineers meet in real systems.
Pulumi State Drift: How Refresh Lies and What to Actually Do
A hard-nosed guide to diagnosing and fixing Pulumi state drift when `pulumi refresh` doesn't behave as expected. Covers real root causes, verification steps, and a war story from production.
Ansible Task Not Idempotent: Changed Every Run
An Ansible task that reports 'changed' on every run is breaking idempotency. This guide covers real-world causes beyond check_mode, from missing diff to transient state in shell commands.
Long-form thinking on debugging habits, observability, and the systems around the bug.
Chaos Engineering at 3 AM: When Our Kubernetes Cluster Lost Its DNS
We ran a chaos experiment on our Kubernetes cluster and found a subtle DNS misconfiguration that would have caused a cascading failure. Here's how we did it and what we learned.
Debugging Inside Docker Containers: Tools, Techniques, and a War Story
Practical techniques for debugging inside Docker containers: exec, nsenter, strace, and a real incident that made me rethink debug images.
kubectl logs: Debugging Pods with Logs, Timestamps, and Previous Instances
Beyond `kubectl logs pod-name` — using timestamps, previous instances, and multi-container patterns to diagnose real failures.
Debugging Serverless Functions Locally: A Practical Approach
Local debugging of serverless functions requires different tools and mindset than traditional apps. Here's how I approach it with real examples.
Debugging Terraform and CloudFormation Errors: A Field Guide to the 3 AM Page
Infrastructure-as-code errors are inevitable. Here's how to systematically debug Terraform and CloudFormation failures without losing your mind.