Solarwinds having some random OOTB feature broken
Difficulty in customising alert thresholds.
Meetings and more meetings
What plagues productivity for me is the numerous tools which are not fully integrated nor implemented completely. This condition leads to the lack of scalability and siloed investigations. As for the "single source of truth?" "You can't visualize the truth" in multiple panes of glass. One begins to look like the scarecrow off the original Wizard of Oz.
Lack of control. For example, not having any say in door security or copiers but still needing to maintain and secure them.
Drive bys with people asking for "urgent" stuff
All the meetings
We've got a talker in the office
Daily Thwack questions - or so my manager would say. Honestly what kills my productivity is interruptions .....so many phone calls and DM's.
Other: interruptions from other parts of the business, too many scheduled projects to focus on, meetings, meetings, and more meetings... The list goes on. Monitoring, alerting, and the tools that enable them are the least of my worries...
meetings and constant fire drill asks!
The biggest productivity killer for our section is attempting to upgrade our SolarWinds Platforms to newer versions of SolarWinds.
End users who can't or won't read alert messages, and instead email the Solarwinds admin to ask, "Why did I get this alert?"
Reacting to unforeseen issues popping up, productivity is a flow and I'm not as flexible as I used to be!
We have trouble breaking the Silos. The silos all still want to use their own tools and won't use our platform to assist in any troubleshooting.
Shiny squirrels
Challenges determining SLIs. (... and then collecting relevant metrics)
As in, figuring out what's important for the business and how it connects to what I (need to) do in my job duties.
As in, answering the questions, "what are the most important business metrics, and what data do we need to keep an eye on them"?
(Seems like such a no-brainer - yet I keep getting "who does this guy think he is?" looks when I try asking this... Is this the tone of my voice? Is it the question itself? Anyone? Bueller? )
definitely meetings but second too that related to tools I would say no single source of truth
The organization for which I'm currently consulting they have a bunch of tools. This is a very "technical" team and they each have their favorites. I'm pushing for SolarWinds to be the single point of truth, but get a lot of pushback from the team.
What kills my productivity? Monday. Ok, the list above is not excatly what I run into. It is close to source of truth, but ... not... To have a source of truth all silos and communication barriers need to stop. Whether it is an investigation, alert storm, or tools, not having all metrics or having information silo'd will kill the source and the investigation. Communication? Cooperation? I am not sure that either clarifies this properly. Its not the 90% but the missing 10% that seems to be the problem. You get there, but it seems to take too long.
YouTube! My SolarWinds works great!
Wearing too many hats, it's death by 1k cuts. Not enough time to get into flow and stay there without some request or question derailing the effort.
meetings and plans made without the input of certain departments.
I can see why people say lack of single source of truth is the biggest pain, but for me the biggest pain is lack of sensible documentation. Yes, Jim, when you don't explain that the 5 MB of variance in free RAM in that particular server can impact call processing in the entirely opposite end of the network, I would overlook that small detail. Would you like to explain to the class why you didn't say something 5 hours ago?
meetings that could be emails!
User interuptions - I have a question about...
Lacking information from developers/application team about what a TRUE failure looks like.
being pulled to work on something else....
lack of planning of other departments and meetings for meetings.
Not using SolarWinds as our main monitoring tool!
