Nonapeptide — THWACK

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I know that Lancope ties into Active Directory as well, so you can correlate users with flows, which is really cool. If I could automatically build a profile that says Jane normally talks to servers A, B, and C with a response time of 40-60ms and now she's at 200ms to the same server, I know something is wrong that…

in What does it take to satisfy you when testing if a service is available or not? Comment by Nonapeptide February 2012
I've been wondering lately if better NetFlow traffic profiling could help with more complicated service measurements. For example, we have a service for a group of internal users that is pretty complex: Wow, that is a complex maze of service dependencies. I hadn't considered NetFlow/sFlow/jFlow/whateverFlow's ability to…

in What does it take to satisfy you when testing if a service is available or not? Comment by Nonapeptide January 2012
That's right according to the letter of the law - but perhaps misses the spirit? Yes, the letter states that, in essence, "Any service provided that does not meet X standards will allow Y remuneration in X fashion." The spirit is therefore that the service provider will "guarantee" uptime above the penalty level. To say…

in What does it take to satisfy you when testing if a service is available or not? Comment by Nonapeptide January 2012
One thing to keep in mind is that in general SLAs won't ever cover your "loss" due to an outage. Nor should they, considering your business gain from that $X VPS is probably multiples of X (if it isn't, you shouldn't be using it). I've only seen a few SLAs that addressed a company's business losses in case of an outage,…

in Service level agreements - do they ever *not* give us headaches? Comment by Nonapeptide January 2012
In my experience having worked at a managed services provider now for over 10 years is that for a service to be "available" it needs to be available for the users to interact with and it must be responsive enough for a good user experience. Perspective 1; User Experience You need to monitor the user experience to make sure…

in What does it take to satisfy you when testing if a service is available or not? Comment by Nonapeptide January 2012
You're not in the minority, no. I rely on that kind of "monitoring" too - but I think the ideal scenario and the one to which we should all strive is to know about things before users do. Perhaps I've drank the ITIL / MOF / ITUP happy-flavored-poison, but I think it's within the realm of possibility to be able to test and…

in What does it take to satisfy you when testing if a service is available or not? Comment by Nonapeptide January 2012
Ohh, that's a good point! A service provider could say "Hey, your dedicated server was up the whole time our core router was in flames!" I think that's a bit facetious of me, however, when looked at in terms of "service availability" rather than just "it's pinging" you realize that an application or service is much more…

in What does it take to satisfy you when testing if a service is available or not? Comment by Nonapeptide January 2012