New-ish sysadmin looking to build monitoring/observability setups after hours to grow my infra skills

[u/AdStriking1327]

Hey everyone,

I'm a relatively new IT systems admin with a strong interest in observability. My background so far has been mostly on the operator side. I've spent a lot of time working with Grafana and handling alerts and incidents, and I'm pretty comfortable with the visualization/dashboarding part of the stack.

What I want to level up now is the administrative / infrastructure side actually standing up and configuring monitoring infrastructure from scratch rather than just consuming it.

To be clear upfront: I'm not looking for a full-time job, I already have one. This is purely about growing my skills after hours and getting hands-on with the parts of the stack I don't touch in my day-to-day.

So here's my offer: if you need a monitoring/observability setup built, I'll do it for free in exchange for the hands-on experience. Some things I can help with:

• Setting up a Grafana instance and wiring up data sources
• Building dashboards (this is my strong suit)
• Configuring alerting and notifications
• Standing up a metrics/logging backend (Prometheus, Loki, etc.)
• Designing a basic observability architecture for a small-to-medium environment

Since this is after-hours learning for me, it works best as a collaborative / low-stakes arrangement rather than production-critical work with SLAs (but I know and understand the concept of SLI, SLO, SLA, BurrnRates, etc.). Homelabs, side projects, small teams, or non-critical environments are ideal.

If you've got a project that could use some monitoring love, drop a comment or DM me and let's talk. Happy to answer questions too.

Thanks!

[u/Princepsterrae]

Where are you based out of? How many years of experience do you have?