_stump · infrastructure engineer

Our help desk tracks the number of contacts a requester has with the help desk staff before the issue is resolved, with the goal of 1. That metric indicates he satisfaction a user has (or doesn't have) when he or she hangs up the phone after calling to report a problem. If the technician is able to resolve the issue during…

I'd want to know if the platform that the database is running on was purpose-built for a database, or was it used because it was available at the time? I've seen many database problems that are rooted in bad design at the server and storage levels. Unless you design the system specifically for a database, and even…

It depends on the nature of the business you're working for. If you're doing internal IT work, certifications don't have as much value to the business, and it's less likely that exam fees and training courses will be covered. Or you'll always be told, "we don't have funding for training this year, but maybe next year." But…

Ugh, this was my assumption as well. Tried for 15 minutes to answer clue 12 before I realized that the spaces don't always match characters in the answer 1:1.

+1 for KISS

ITT: A bunch of whiners.

Steal away! The truth belongs to everyone.

It'd be awesome to automate this process, so that the provisioning of a virtual machine includes workflows to add monitoring. I mean, vCOps would pick it up, but other tools that don't interface with vCenter might miss them. I'm on the fence about discovery-style solutions for picking up new devices. I like that NPM scans…

Relevant XKCD. I like standards that are practical, pragmatic, founded on sound reasoning, and functional. Standards for arbitrary reasons are awful; the comic book superheroes one rings true with me (primarily because I've never been a comic book geek). The challenge I see often is that, in a crisis, standards are thrown…

Totally agree! This is where IT shops can mature from monitoring just things, to monitoring services. I've seen Exchange outages, for example, that knocked people offline. Meanwhile, all of the servers, storage, and network resources that support Exchange have nice green lights in the monitoring tools. If the lights are…

I predict demand that, in 2016, the thwack store have Orion Coffee.

I think the same uneasiness was common when virtualization gained popularity in the mid 2000s. Now you'd be hard to pressed to find a data center that only has bare metal workloads. Do you think the same thing will happen with cloud computing?

It's funny to think that people (and yes, sometimes that means network engineers) spend their entire careers connecting heterogenous devices and networks to enable communication, but can't walk down the hall to talk to their counterparts.

No worries! I'm OCD'ing pretty bad right now on those points. I may or may not be keeping a spreadsheet.

Fire burn and cauldron bubble. Ok, I feel better. Couldn't let that line go unfinished! (Can't help it. English Major.)

uh, oh. better add another 4 vCPUs to that single-threaded application VM.

Regarding your answer to 2: do you ever get stuck between multiple vendors and conflicting best practices? Just curious.

Cloud computing provides a new lexicon of abilities and risks. It's largely up to customers to use these resources appropriately. That's the biggest advantage that an on-prem hosting staff has to offer: service and support.

In a perfect world, all walls would be whiteboards.

I've never had a problem with a Webex remote support session. For a while, I lived my professional life in Webex. Of course it's a security risk. You can mitigate that risk, but you can't know the security of the other end of that session. You'd need security controls and monitors in place, along with an isolated segment…

That's a great set up!

So virtualization crosses those organizational lines for you, too. Based on the responses so far, that's how everyone handles virt. Do you run into issues when there's an outage, and it's not clear which team should own the resolution?

To be honest, I'm not convinced that containers will dominate enterprise IT in the way that virtualization has. Virtualization addressed a litany of problems that were pervasive in the on-prem data center world: low hardware utilization, space constraints, server mobility, and separating hardware from servers. And while I…

that underscore in my username is finally paying off.

Welcome.

Ugh. So sorry that you've got to deal with this issue. Thanks for everything that you and the team does to keep this community spam-free and booming!

I'm not sure what I think about "thwackers"...

Totally agree. I tend to lump the infrastructure monitoring into the "engineering" bucket, and put application / service monitoring into the "operations" bucket. The tech details you list are perfect for engineering and diagnostics, but the business units only care about whether their precious applications are available.

TRICKY. I read it three times after seeing your message and got it right. Wording on some of these questions is... questionable.

Totally agree. You can make an educated guess, but that's it. In my experience, trends have a way of spiking as soon as you call them a trend.