byrona ✭✭✭✭✭

In reading between the lines on this I think it does a good job of highlighting that monitoring needs to be a very deliberate thing. It takes planning and thoughtfulness to get it right if you want to have the necessary information to successfully manage your network, systems and ultimately your client experience.

The biggest problem we have with Packet Analysis is that much of our infrastructure is 10Gb which is not supported by many tools and the ones that do are very expensive.

ecklerwr1​ I totally agree with the no tolerance approach. I recently heard the quote "The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate.", I think this is a perfect example of why you can't tolerate such things.

To use your quote, being able to "see past the end of your own desk" is so important. Being able to understand how all of the things are interconnected and rely on each other to provide an end-user service is crucial to being successful in this industry. We just re-organized our system engineering team into pods where each…

Jfrazier​ you are absolutely right about that and I have seen it on several occasions; however, it often doesn't work out well. Companies still need people on staff that understand and can manage their applications. I have seen companies reduce headcount only to find nobody knew how to manage their applications and then…

I agree that the term "backup" gets used in a much too generic way. Internally we have been trending away from using the term backup and moving toward "data protection". This makes it easier to transition into a conversation on how you protect your data and what you protect it against. 

That's awesome info ecklerwr1​; thanks for sharing that!

rschroeder‌ I have been in that exact situation and occasionally have to have that same "Nagios" discussion with somebody. Some people think that because they don't have to pay for it they are getting a real deal; that couldn't be further from the truth in many situations.

While everybody loves to hate on Microsoft, the Windows OS is easy to manage and easy to do so in large quantities. Because MS has a relatively consistent standard they use for things such as patching and logging there are a ton of 3rd party products (such as those offered by SolarWinds) that do a great job at supporting…

This is certainly not a place you ever want to find yourself in. One other way to help avoid this is to diversify; don't put all your eggs into one basked. You may not need to go to the point of specializing in a bunch of technologies; however, it certainly doesn't hurt to become familiar with them.

I think the best part is where the security guard (the person there to protect your stuff) is holding the door for the guy and doesn't think it at all suspicious or worth reporting that the guy is taking out valuable equipment in the middle of the night.

jkump​ I always have felt the same way, that Java had sort of done this same thing with JVM's.

We have been helping clients migrate to virtual environments for years now. One of the best practices we learned very early on is to not just go out thinking you are going to P2V everything; P2V should be your last option. You are much better building out new systems and migrating or rebuilding your applications; you will…

We have used all of the different methods you mention with varying degrees of success. I agree that using the P2V tools is generally a last option. Our method for any physical to virtual migration is normally to build a new VM and then migrate the data. Many of these types of migrations that we have done also included…

Agreed! One of the things the Gartner report considers is how the overall industry evolves each year and if the rest of the products are moving ahead at a faster rate than you are, well, the results are obvious. Again, I continue to be a huge supporter of LEM, it has a fantastic framework, it's a very approachable product…

I always laugh because in these planning sessions I often hear people reference planning for "if a meteor hit the building" scenario. I don't know about you but I don't recall the last time I heard about a meteor hitting a building. Of course with that said I think I am going to go knock on some wood now. I think the…

mcam​ I completely agree with you on this. The religious debates in IT drive me insane. I think it's great to be passionate about what you do but sometimes we need to be more pragmatic with our approaches to problems and not be emotionally attached to our ideas in such a way that we feel personally insulted if somebody…

I think Kiwi is a great product. I have even suggested HERE that they use it to replace the aged and failing Syslog solution that comes as part of Orion.

The big challenge I have found with DevOps is getting them to really partner with the System Admins and System Engineers versus going off and designing what they feel will be useful. If DevOps and the Systems people really work together you get a really amazing result; however, if they don't work together you end up with a…

Awesome information. I would love to see the same thing for HIPAA!

ghostinthenet​ again, thanks for this information. The only things I really know at this point about containers is based on what I have read, I have not practical experience. I have recently been working with some Azure based PaaS services which have been a challenge. This all got me to thinking about the need for a Zero…

I think it's definitely important to have all of those technologies in place: change detection, backups, change approval process, etc. even without the disgruntled employee in the picture. My takeaway from this article is while technology can't fix stupid, it can certainly help with early detection and recovery from it. 

I think this will be an awesome new addition to Thwack. I have often wanted to post conversations that were less product specific and never really found a great place for that in the past so I am really looking forward to this.

I think it would be awesome if every SolarWinds Agent could act as it's own polling engine not just for the node it's on but for polling other things as well. It's not a stretch considering that these agents are already running a subset of the same software that a polling engine uses. This would decentralize monitoring and…

Wow, this is a lot to comment on! Cloud technologies have certainly been a huge disruption in the industry. They have caused a lot of confusion and there has been a lot of misunderstandings propagated to try and sell these services. This has left many companies not sure of what to do or how to do it. My advice for any…

Having good systems in place that show you traffic flow is important but you still also need good cabling practices. The solution I have seen be successful when it comes to cable management is making an individual or team responsible for the cabling and cleanliness there-of. If somebody isn't held accountable for it then…

I couldn't agree with this more. The communication on this seems crazy over complicated.

I totally agree with you ecklerwr1​. The challenge with all of those events is actually finding the signal through all of the noise. Even with good tools in place this is an incredibly difficult thing to do. The problem is that most monitoring is designed around capturing known issues or known events of concern and in this…

Funny thing about password changes, more studies are finding that forcing people to change their passwords on a frequent basis is actually lowering security because it leads to them doing things like writing them down and the such. We would be much better off by moving to 2F authentication or even moving away from…

This was a while back so I honestly don't recall the specifics and it was also right after the Upgrade Advisor was made available (if I recall correctly). If I run across any similar issues going forward I will be sure to note them.