byrona ✭✭✭✭✭

Jfrazier​ think I am going to need to agree with you on this. Even if it isn't a server in the traditional sense it still will have all of the makings of a server.

At this point considering where the technology has come I think people should be requiring special justification for anything to not be virtual. The lack of flexibility in a non-virtualized environment is really difficult to overlook and alone should be justification enough for things be virtualized.

Sure, I can give an example... I have a custom node property called Monitoring_Type and there are two options Active or Passive. All of my alerts have a condition that requires Monitoring_Type = Active for the alert to trigger. This allows me to set devices to Passive so I can continue to collect data but not receive…

But today, efficiency seems to be a lost art. Throwing hardware at the problem gets easier with each passing day. I agree and it's sad that this has become the way of things. One of my past managers would not sign off on more hardware as a solution unless we could how him that was the only and correct solution; he would…

Dude, that's not cool; some things can't be unseen! 

This is totally awesome, its pretty much what I was asking for in my Whiteboard Feature Request a few years back! I am super excited about this.

mdriskell‌ I can't agree with you more on this!

We are a Hybrid Services Provider and work closely with Microsoft to leverage Azure in addition to the private clouds we host in our data-centers. We recently did a really cool proof-of-concept with a client to provide a follow-the-sun model with a Hybrid approach. We had the primary systems in our data-center and then…

The custom connector builder or something along those lines is a must for us. When customers or other internal folks ask me if I can support a specific log type my answer always needs to be "yes", even if it's a "yes, but", having "no" as my answer simply isn't accepted.

Thwack really is a unique community, SolarWinds has created something that other companies could only wish to have. I have actually spoke to other software companies that said they tried to create a community modeled after Thwack and failed. 

What makes this even more difficult is when the business stakeholders and decision makers can't agree on what is important and provide clear direction to IT. As has been pointed out here in multiple other posts, it's becoming imperative that the folks that work in IT understand the business, how it operates and what is…

I think most organizations could benefit from a more structured troubleshooting process, especially when it involves multiple people or multiple departments.

Jfrazier​ I would agree with this completely! SIEM tools are a great example; Splunk always ends up on the top of their list. While I don't think Splunk is a bad tool, they don't seem to take any penalty in the ratings for the fact that it is super expensive or the fact that it pretty much doesn't do anything out of the…

Cookies, sold! The Dark Side is clearly for me. 

We use a lot of Fortinets in our environment as well and I have found that they are not very well supported by most 3rd party applications. With that being said it looks like we may be moving more towards PaloAlto.

sqlrockstar​; after hosting that many people and having a super busy holiday but still taking the time to do this post shows how truly dedicated you are to your craft and to this community. Folks like you are what make SolarWinds such a great company and partner to work with!

I have read a lot of discussions that touch on several of the subjects being touched on here; SNMP being antiquated, the need for a better data collection model, etc. I think instead of re-inventing the wheel it may make more sense to apply a different approach to an already existing technology (or set of technologies).…

I kind of feel like #1 is the holy grail of network engineers. I have to wonder how many places really have something like that in place and how realistic something like that even is for most companies. I would certainly love to hear from any folks here that have automated self-healing networks in place and if so I would…

I agree with network defender​ especially considering that security is a people intensive process, it's not something you can just automate.

Another important point about backups is making sure to do them in a way that is non-disruptive to our environment. As everything else has become more complicated with highly virtualized environments, backups are no exception to this. Doing backups both successfully and in a way that have minimal impact to your production…

It's become very clear to me that the term "hybrid IT" does not mean the same thing to everybody. Monitoring what I consider to be hybrid IT has become a huge problem. Monitoring our on-prem stuff is pretty easy as those capabilities have been around for a long time but when we go to cloud based services that aren't IaaS…

Scripting always leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Don't get me wrong, I completely see the value of scripting and even use it myself when appropriate. Unfortunately I have seen folks choose to support and run entire environments on scripts (that don't even work very well) versus using good commercial applications. To me…

I really would like to see the "Rise of the Monitoring Engineer"! I feel like those of us that do this are under appreciated and under recognized. It's often expected that this is done as a side task versus an actual full-time job on it's own.

Whew, I thought I was going crazy for a second, kept going back and fourth trying to figure out the difference between the two.

Communication between our Operations and DevOps team was definitely a problem at first, there was basically no communicator and DevOps was off working in a silo and Operations had no way to submit requirements into DevOps. There have recently been some changes in our organization that I am hoping will help with that. The…

sqlrockstar​ Thanks so much for writing this! I can't tell you how many clients we have had come to us with "SQL Performance Issues" only to find that it was the result of them not actually taking the time to configure it properly. 

Love the meme, I work in OPS and that is spot on. It must be nice to be an engineer and work in a perfect bubble with out silly things like "the real world" getting in your way. LOL

These types of systems should be treated as risks to the company and evaluated as such. If the risk is high enough a remediation plan should be put into place to reduce or remove the risk.

I have a love/hate relationship with coding. I always think it's something that I would like and I always think it would be something I would be good at; however, every time I sit down and try to start learning a programming language I find that I absolutely hate it and I can't say why. I love doing data analytics, I love…

Since you are currently using LEM and you mention rapid growth of logging demands, could you share what kind of volume you are currently handling with LEM?