So already having baselines is great, everybody needs to have that so that they understand normal.
During a massive shift to work from home, you need a new baseline category for business continuity purposes.
It allows you to visualize the shift in certain resources to establish the new abnormal that may exist for a period of time.
When things return to normal you can refer back to the original baseline to see how close things return to normal.
This gives you different views into needs and requirements for different situations and info to provide additional resources overtime as growth occurs under a normal baseline.
Due to snow events in my state we already had times when a good portion of the workforce worked from home so we were pretty well prepared for the load and had monitoring in place for everything. We did add a few firewalls to increase capacity but in hindsight we would have been fine with what was already in place. All of our systems worked so well management is considering working from home as a permanent option for some roles.
We had all the baselines tracked, and we were ready to predict to Management what we could support for a predicted pandemic. It turned out we were 100% correct in our evaluations and predictions.
This didn't happen in a vacuum or on short notice. We'd been planning for a larger remote support and Internet demand for years, and we had just implemented hardware and service upgrades, prior to COVID-19, that we were able to make available to our staff and customers without pause or problems.
We were good to have been predicting future needs, and budgeting to fill them properly from two years back. And it was lucky we had this already in play prior to the pandemic. It makes me wonder if it's better to be good or to be lucky?
We have a separate network that is actually name Baseline. It is where all of our final testing happens before anything goes out the door.
I do a lot of work with customers that have monitoring, but it's not meeting their needs. Unfortunately, when they call me in it's not just to take over, but to fix and clean up also. Having no existing baselines it can take some time to get things right.
We currently have a free version of Nagios which I inherited and was very poorly set up. I've done my best with it and put together the case for a decent system. We got the money approved for Solarwinds and bought the hardware and software. I had just fitted the tin into the server racks when we were all sent home. Another day and I would have had the O/S and remote access set up so could have been setting up all the monitoring. I have all the 'normal' in my head and generally spot when something isn't right. Unfortunately they then furloughed me and I don't believe anyone else knows what the normal looks like. Ho Hum.
Totally unprepared as usual due to lack of investment and senior management not listening
