_stump · infrastructure engineer

Couldn't agree with you more. It's a shame that the term "social engineering" has been co-opted by the security field. I consider myself a social engineer because I don't sit at my desk for 8 hours a day and work in isolation. It's the casual interaction with your peers that can turn into well-informed designs for your…

Pretty sure we should all be running user 3.0 at this point. 1.0 is EoL.

Aw, man! I didn't even know this was going on. It's a short drive from the office here, too. Hope it's a great event!

Dude. DUDE. You're like my twin from high school. Even had the same shirt. Are you me?

The medusa link is broken for me.... https://thwack.solarwinds.com/polls/2122

Same here! None of the answers was 100% correct. Bummer. Fun nonetheless.

I really like this post. It's a good reminder that there's more to monitoring than just adding a host to your monitoring solution. It's also a good reason to not get carried away with the "pets vs. cattle" metaphor that is getting a little out of hand; when you start treating all workloads the same, you end up with blind…

Our SIEM was a compliance checkbox. YUP. All hail compliance! Compliance allows us to do a lot of stuff, spend a lot of money, and deliver a lot of presentations without actually improving the security posture of an organization.

I wish I knew why some engineers are drawn to tools like Orion NPM while others view them as purely operational. I keep a tab open for each monitoring tool we have, even though I'm not responsible for monitoring (at least not on paper). Who doesn't do that, right? We have a few dozen tools in the environment, and I bet…

Totally agree with your statement about promotion within organizations falling away. Many businesses are looking for wholesale transformation of the services they provide and the technologies used to automate and manage their operations. It's tough work if you're expecting the same people who built the old system, and who…

Stop making me have fun when I'm trying to learn!

Two different approaches, separated by a few years and therefore a shift in the policy and application of BYOD. 1) Employees and visitors were welcome to bring their own devices, but they could only connect to the guest network after physically presenting their device to the IT Service Desk for inspection. That meant…

It's amazing what you can do with freely available tools and a little brainpower. So many IT shops overlook solutions like these in favor of big-name vendor solutions. The examples and use cases you provided are awesome, and it'd be great if more network and systems engineers took advantage of this information. Great post!

Neither did I, at first. The image in the post is the first of a dozen slides. Use the arrows to advance and see the predictions. TRICKY WITHOUT COFFEE!

UCS makes things slightly better, since it's RBAC friendly. But it also reinforces the server / network / storage team isolation that I think is holding many organizations back from modernization. But aside from controlling traffic through the Fabric Interconnects down to the vNICs, you still can't see what's happening…

Only to a degree. If your first step in your journey to the cloud is a multi-year study into the feasibility of cloud-baed service models, you're doing it wrong. It'd be like planning your Agile transformation in a waterfall schedule.

AND TENNILLE is the funniest thing in the history of the Internet. For now, at least.

This is awesome. Sounds like you're more interested in monitoring the services you provide, not just the pieces of the infrastructure. That's really what I'm driving at here.

No one has total control over their environment. Unless you've personally reviewed each line of code in each product you use, you're giving up some degree of control to your technology partners. Just like we trust VMware and Microsoft for our on-prem VMs today, we trust Amazon, Google, and others with our cloud workloads.…

...eventually the business/IT says "why are we paying for this?" and the tool sprawl begins... Exactly. A colleague of mine is wrapping up a enterprise-wide tools assessment for a mid-sized IT shop, and he's found over 80 tools in use. Because all of the purchases came from different managers and departments, there was…

The mainframe analogy is dead on. I’m sure we will see future tech throw shade at cloud in the same fashion.

Tesla driver checking in. Autopilot is amazing. I use it every day on a long commute to the office. And by use it, I mean I use it properly. No napping, no texting or messing with the phone just because the car is semi-autonomous. I'm always ready to take over if it can't navigate a particular maneuver. Meanwhile, I watch…

Current and complete documentation is vital to well-managed networks. Because people change jobs often, and what seems straight-forward to you may seem arcane to another engineer. Documentation that includes not just how things are configured, but WHY they're configured a certain way, is AWESOME. I'm also starting to think…

Me, too! I'll take the points in any event.

Followed by "you can't prove it's the network!". That this situation is so humorous is actually pretty sad.

It's now occurring to me that, if you really want to dig into performance problems with your SQL server, you could always point SAM at it and load up the SQL performance counters. Could be a quick way for non-SQL people to learn where their bottlenecks are. Other thing to note: I mentioned keeping your SQL databases and…

Which version of MSSQL are you using? Could it be Express? You may be hitting the 4GB limit on certain released of Microsoft's free SQL offering. 2008 R2 and later use 10GB as its upper database limit.

Maybe the polling interval on Orion is set to collect stats less frequently, whereas vCenter is logging performance in near-real time. If you miss the spikes in your 5 minute polling intervals, it'll throw off the graphs in Orion. The graphs are similar in that they show a regular increase in CPU load, so my money is on…

You bet! Always happy to help.

You can love your software, just don't love your software.