The movie has been criticized for the same things that make it a great dramatic story on its own. But there are good reasons for some of the choices it makes.
Warning: Encounter many SPOILERS, you will.

Two pairs of high performance headphones facing off in a direct A/B comparison. May the most accurate sound win!

When making a telescope mirror on the machine, two parameters are important: the rotation speed of the mirror, and the rotation speed of the overarm eccentric. Other environmental parameters also matter: temperature and humidity are foremost here. To more easily monitor and display these variables, I’ve built an electronic device that collects this data and shows it on the control panel. This is how to build the device.

Is your Graphite backend not fast enough for either receiving metrics, or querying, or both? Split it up for a massive performance boost.

One VPN server not reliable enough? Create more than one, and connect them together.

Running a VPN server with OTP? Thinking to run your own OTP authentication backend, instead of the public backend? This is how to do it.

Building a distributed VPN mesh (multiple VPN servers, authenticating same accounts, having same routing)? Want to give a security boost to authentication? Thinking about multifactor? Here’s one of the many architectures that work.

Here’s a way to improve the security of your private SSH keys using a cheap smartcard.

There’s a cornucopia of tools for monitoring cloud infrastructure: Sensu, Graphite, Logstash, Riemann, etc. The very, very good news is that most of these tools speak each other’s protocols. This opens up a lot of possibilities: from small setups where some components (e.g. the message queue) are reused, serving many purposes at once, to complex architectures where the various functions are decoupled, there are large amounts of redundancy at various levels, etc.

Moving your infrastructure into the cloud, or thinking to do so? Still using old monitoring tools such as Nagios and Munin? There’s trouble for you on the horizon. But there are better ways to do monitoring in the cloud - read on to find out.