-
Making performance metrics make sense to your business
A lot of times as administrators or infrastructure people we all too often get stuck “keeping the lights on”. What I mean by this, is we have our tools and scripts in place to monitor all of our services and databases, we have notification set up to alert us when they are down or experiencing trouble, and we have our…
-
Will I Save Money by Moving to the Cloud?
This post is post one in a small series, taking an atypical look at the public cloud and why you may or may not want to leverage it. Part 2 asks the question I'm Still On-Premises, Is That OK? and in part 3 we explore SaaS in Beyond IaaS, Cloud for the SMB, the Enterprise, and Beyond! Did you know AWS came about partly…
-
Putting on your X-Ray goggles to Visualize the Business Services Spectrum
I love watching those modern movies where IT works magically. In these movies, any average Joe with access to a computer or terminal can instantly access anything with seamless effort. Everything is clear and neat, we’re presented with impeccably clean data centers, long alleys of servers with no spaghetti cables lying…
-
Application Dependency Mapping: Security and Ongoing ADM
Application Dependency Mapping: Security and Ongoing ADM Well, here we are. Finally, on the last post of this series. If you have not been following along, you can find the previous posts: part one, part two, part three, part four, and part five. And, if you have been following along, I hope you have found at least…
-
Business Services and their challenges in complex environments
Business services and infrastructure services have divergent interests and requirements: business services are not focusing on IT. They may leverage IT, but their role is to be a core enabler for the organization to execute on its business strategy, i.e. delivering tangible business outcomes to internal or external…
-
Our Cloud Bill Is WHAT?! - Battle of the Clouds Series
Submitted for your approval; a story of cloud horrors. One of performance issues impacting production. Where monthly cloud billing began spiraling out of control. The following story is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. During my consulting career, I’ve encountered companies at many different…
-
Better Together - Working Together in Silo Organizations
In my last post WHEN BEING AN EXPERT ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH: MASTER OF ALL TRADES, JACK OF NONE, you all shared some great insight on how you were able to be find ways to be successful as individual SMEs and contributors, and how you could navigate the landscape of an organization. This week, I’d like to talk about silo…
-
Don't Let Technical Debt Be Your Company's Subprime Loan: Mapping Your Way to Better Software
I was in the pub recently for the local quiz and afterwards, I got talking to someone I hadn’t seen for a while. After a few minutes, we started discussing a certain app he loves on his new phone, but he wished the creators would fix a problem with the way it displayed information, so it looks like it does when he logs in…
-
Knowing Which Services Are Critical to a Business Service
In the age of exploration, cartographers used to navigate around the world and map the coastlines of unexplored continents. The coastline of IT, and moreover the inner landscapes and features, has become much more complex than a decade ago. The cost and effort needed to perform adequate mapping the old way has gone way…
-
Templates vs. Policies
Are configuration templates still needed with an automation framework? Or does the automation policy make them a relic of the past? Traditional Configuration Management: Templates We've all been there. We always keep a backup copy of a device's configuration, not just for recovery, but to use as a baseline for configuring…