The seasonal gift show is back - Joey Snow and Rick Claus bring their lists of great gifts for sysadmins. You know they're impossible to buy for, so we are making it easier for you with a range of prices and seriousness for your favorite sysadmin. Useful gadgets, upgrades to older devices, and some fun stuff that reminds the sysadmins in your life that you get their struggles. Share this show and toy list with everyone you know who struggles to find the right thing!

Links

• USB Tester
• Battery Daddy
• USB Air Duster
• Smart Soldering Iron
• Pro Tech Go Toolkit
• Effing Candle Co
• Dumpster Fire Pencil Holder
• NES Cartridge Hard Drive Enclosure
• PicoKVM
• CO2 Meter
• Wireless Headphones
• Digital Photo Frame
• Super-Knips with Lead Catcher
• Inkplate 6COLOR
• Insta360 Link 2
• Home Assistant Voice
• Throw Throw Burrito
• Bose Ultra Open Earbuds
• Ubiquiti Cloud Gateway Fiber

Recorded October 30, 2025

How can Azure Site Reliability Engineering Agents help your Azure infrastructure? While at Techorama in Utrecht, Richard chatted with Deepthi Chelupati about the LLM service that helps you build and maintain more reliable applications and infrastructure in Azure. Deepthi talks about monitoring deployment problems, handling errors in production, and application telemetry in operation as areas where Azure SRE Agents can help catch issues earlier and let you respond faster. The conversation dives into the array of capabilities and where you can provide information to administrators so they can decide how to proceed—perhaps pushing information to development or starting a recovery process of some kind. How you use Azure SRE Agents is up to you!

Links

• Azure SRE Agent
• PagerDuty
• Azure Monitor
• Azure DevOps

Recorded October 28, 2025

How resilient are your Azure deployments? Richard chats with Chris Ayers about his work on Azure reliability - not only for customers using Azure, but for Azure itself! Chris focuses on the Well-Architected Framework as a guideline for thinking through all the elements of resiliency in Azure. As with all things, there are trade-offs of cost and reliability - you'll want to build a spreadsheet to balance the cost of an outage against the expenses of resiliency services in Azure - and your own labor to maintain it! Chris provides his own talks and an extensive list of links for you to build up a comprehensive analysis of resiliency options - check it out!

Links

• FastTrack
• Azure Status
• Azure Well Architected Framework
• Virtual Machine Scale Set
• Deployment Stamps Pattern
• Automatic Scaling in Azure App Service
• Azure Monitor
• Azure Command-Line Interface
• Copilot in Azure
• Azure Advisor
• Azure Proactive Resiliency Library v2
• Azure Front Door
• Chris' Azure Resiliency Talk

Recorded October 3, 2025