byrona ✭✭✭✭✭

As environments continue to hybridize and use more of a combination of all of the different technologies and services you listed I personally would like to see the next "glue" be the monitoring system. A monitoring/management platform that allows me to both see and manage these things from one single interface. I realize…

rschroeder​ I think this is a great example of why you can't always trust the Gartner Magic Quadrants. I think Orion has a great vision and should certainly be moved further to the right in the MQ. I have seen people with a lot more expensive tools do much less than what I can do with Orion.

This isn't a single backup, it's backups for everything. We have staggered them as much as we can and still keep them all running within the backup window. We also have a bunch of different backup types taking place, App Aware backups using agents, agent-less VM snapshot backups, etc. all depending on the…

We are a service provider and the idea of automation on large scales is incredibly exciting.... and incredibly scary. My largest concern is that all software has bugs. The more widespread and the more control an application has the larger the risk a potential software bug has on your environment. Imagine the possibility of…

We work with several healthcare organizations and at the end of the day it always comes down to cost. As you mentioned, achieving the 100% uptime capabilities comes with a hefty cost and while most organizations want the 100% uptime most of them can't afford it. When they can't afford it the result is generally cutting…

I think one piece to solving this problem is bringing Shadow IT out of the shadows and letting it happen in the open and not necessarily discouraging it completely. I think you certainly need to secure your production infrastructure and control what types of activities take place there, this is certainly not the place for…

Thanks for the really helpful post! My personal experience is that the security field is very difficult to get into and requires at least a broad understanding of a lot of different technologies. It's nice to see people out there trying to help new folks get into this field.

tinmann0715​ I would agree with what Jfrazier​ said. You should get a good SIEM system which will allow you to tier your data so that some data (hot data) is quickly available while cold data is archived allowing for longer retention times. You should probably shoot for a year on the archive data and somewhere between a…

One of the awesome things about the place I work is that I have a virtual lab with pretty much every OS and application at my disposal. The problem is I am so busy I have absolutely no time to use it. It's like having access to a candy store but the candy dispensers don't work... no candy!

I would absolutely love to see SolarWinds to put out a good web transaction load testing tool, it makes sense to be part of WPM; however, if it was a separate tool that would be okay with me as well. Either way this is functionality I am looking for a good solution for and unfortunately SolarWinds currently doesn't have it.

Once when I was trying to make a case for having our company invest in an electronic password management system I got into an argument with another co-worker who insisted that keeping all of our passwords written down on a paper notepad locked up in a safe was a much better than using an electronic password storage system…

Nothing screws things up more than having more than one way to refer to something. It will always find a way to bite you. You aren't kidding about this Jfrazier​! As a service provider we manage systems that belong to different clients and each one has their own different naming convention coupled with the fact we have our…

That is correct, it has data from multiple application components.

We broke down the silos years ago and consolidated all of the teams on one toolset under one manager and it made a huge difference. One thing to realize is a the end of the day all anybody really cares about are the applications, everything else is just a means to delivering those applications. Because of this everybody…

One thing I have found with DevOps guys is that hey tend to prefer the open source technologies for just about everything including monitoring; likely due to the increased flexibility. I have found this personally within my own environment and have also talked to others that have told me the same thing is true in their…

We are currently going through the process of selecting our next-gen SIEM & Change Detection solution. The products we have evaluated are SolarWinds LEM, IBM QRadar, LogRythm, NNT Change Tracker/Log Tracker. In doing this evaluation I have also had a peek into the industry around training and consulting for these systems…

Yes, that would be a great start. To take it a bit further allowing a bit of text formatting (bold, underline, indent, bullets, etc) would be nice.

Our team is expected to have a broad understanding of all disciplines as well as be specialized in a few. Every specialization is supposed to have a primary and a backup person so we always have coverage. While we certainly have evidence of the old model in play, we definitely lean more toward the new model where…

I think you make great points here that it really come down to needing a holistic and well rounded approach, not a single tool or single angled approach. SIEM solutions are often postured as security solutions but another benefit that I found that often doesn't get mentioned is the operational value. For example as a…

It's important to work with a provider that you can trust and will work with you. We provide hybrid solutions for our clients but we provide them with as much visibility as possible and work with them to make sure their applications meet their performance requiements.

I continue to run into challenges because this relatively basic function is missing. I would love to see some traction on this.

I have worked with tools that do this including VMAN and found the workload simulations to only bet partially useful... when they work. Unfortunately I have found the data from such tools inaccurate a few too many times to trust them completely. I personally have found just some basic baseline data such as host or cluster…

I am super excited that one of our biggest focuses this year will be moving/consolidating everything to our modern environment. We are currently operating with several different iterations of technology environments with only one of them being considered modern and we will be consolidating to that while also re-working and…

Another aspect of BC/DR that is often overlooked is the people. If a disaster strikes in the area where your primary datacenter is (say a big earthquake) and that is also where your people are, who is going to do the work to restore stuff as most BC/DR plans are not fully automated.

Great Post! I always love looking back on the year because I am always impressed with how much actually got done and the progress that was made. During the day-to-day you often don't feel like progress is really being made so taking time to reflect back is always good.

AppOptics looks pretty cool, I am looking forward to giving it a try when I have some free time.

In addition to "Packets never lie, people do" Logs never lie. 

ecklerwr1​ LOL, you may be on to something here. We may have the same challenges because we are using the same solution; we also use CommVault. While our CommVault guy seems really knowledgeable it seems that the product is a beast to manage with maybe too many options and too much complexity. Maybe backup is a case where…

Oh, don't get me wrong, I agree with you on this 110%. Unfortunately I have given up no the idea of SW fixing this in Orion.

Over the years we have had some very intelligent people that we have had to ultimately part ways with because they were incapable of working with others.