goodzhere

No you are not missing anything. Danielle already stated that she would be busy. She is at Cisco Live. It may not be til next week before we see more names. Hopefully mine will be one of them. lol

I am always learning and I like it. I can learn in almost any way and I am fortunate for that. I don't really even have a preference. The saying is that you learn something new everyday. I sure try to.... 

Congrats network defender ! Great story!

The password article is dead on.

I totally agree. Thresholds are also key. If you know a certain alarm or warning is a violation of a global threshold, it should adjusted to account for it. No need to leave a false positive around. If you don't, it will be overlooked and ignored when there is a problem.

In my own opinion, I do not think that generalists are going anywhere anytime soon, in the federal or civilian realms. They are still needed. General Help Desks and entry-level technicians are made up of mostly generalists. They usually aren't strong in specific areas. They may even bounce around different areas to…

Good reads as usual. Too much craziness in the world today. Things today tend to get easier and better while also getting worse at the same time.

TFTP is very insecure. NCM comes with a SCP/SFTP server that can be used as a more secure method of transferring the configs. TFTP is OK to use in very small business networks, but you really should look to get away form using it on larger networks. I wish that Cisco would just phase out that option already.

I agree with the idea of having a "Core" database and then also having seperate databases for each of the modules. I don't mind NPM being the core database. I would like to see NCM, NTA, SAM, VNQM, etc. There is a lot in these databases that can be stored in the Core database and referenced there. I do a lot of custom…

It starts with people to decipher the regulations. They then have to acquire and configure the software. And the software always has its limitations. Some of the regulations REQUIRE that a person look at how the environment is and what policies are in place. There is not any configuration management software that will do…

I have a job set up to perform a nightly write config on all devices. In the next hour, a job downloads the "different" startup and running configs. I then have another job to run 1 hour after that runs the startup config check job.

YES PLEASE!

I wish there were more of these for each of the products. Then we could scroll a rotating background with the different products.

IT Pros don't get extra long lunches. We love what we do so much, we work through them. lol

This is great and good to have, but we are also opening the door to cause a dependency. This dependency is not necessarily a good thing. We should not be relying solely on technology, as that is exactly what our enemies will attack to cripple us. It is just common battlefield strategy. Communication is almost always the…

I have always loved troubleshooting. It has made me what I am today. It has projected my career forward so many time. I do most of my learning based off of troubleshooting and the need to know WHY. 

I think you are doing more than enough. Keep up ALL the good work!

I agree. I have enjoyed this series.

I have been digging into this a lot lately. There is quite a bit of tuning that needs to be done to get the the proper results. There is an enormous amount of information being gathered by the underlying products in the AppStack environment. I like what I am seeing.

Her post was..."Chris is such a 70's baby! Outside with his neon orange sweatband and wrist bands on..."

Thanks. This is awesome!. I love it! I'm going to print it out and post it up!

I don't feel that we have a good patch management solution here. SCCM and a lot of manual patching is performed here. Fortunately for me, it is not something that I have to deal with on a regular basis. I have in the past, but I am glad to be away from it now.

I don't think I will be trying to convince management that the hybrid cloud is a good approach anytime soon. I am not completely sold on it and all ours is inhouse. Most larger company IT departments will not want to lose control of services.

Unfortunately, this isn't going away anytime soon

grandlanman I have a few out there already. These should do what you are looking for: Cisco 3750/2950 IOS Upgrade(using SCP) NCM Template Cisco 3800/3900 IOS Upgrade NCM Template 3800 IOS Upgrade NCM Template Cisco 3900 IOS Upgrade NCM Template 6500 IOS Upgrade Steps for use with NCM templates Cisco_Nexus…

I think most places use the log everything and set it and forget it approach. Logging gets to be very tedious and most organizations don't hire people to actually go through and look at the logs for issues. It becomes a back-burner task until an issue occurs. When the issue occurs, it moves to the front burner. Why weren't…

We really don't have this problem too much where I am now. I have definitely seen it in the past. In most places, NetOps and InfoSec have no choice but to work together. InfoSec is usually handling the firewalls and IDSs/IPSs, but the NetOps teams are handling the routers. The routers require ACLs and routes to be…

I am going to have to look into some of these tools. I had not heard of them all.

Do you take baselines at all? How many? How often? Yes, Before/After each integration period * What counters/metrics do you collect? bandwith util., latency, memory, cpu, all software/hardware versions, etc * Do you baseline your applications during peak usage? Low usage? Month end? Not doing apps yet * Do you rely solely…

The database server, its connectivity, and its backups are also very important. A non-optimized and/or a minimal-speced DB server will really cause issues. Don't forget about you network connectivity to it.