jhandberg · Enterprise Event Monitoring Engineer · ✭✭✭✭✭

I have one caveat about this. I wouldn't mind a thermostat or more accurately a temp sensor that could send me an alert. A couple of years ago I was out of town for a few days around Christmas. I came back to a very cold house because the furnace sparker failed. If it had gotten much colder, I might have had burst water…

Offline documentation can be helpful as well. I had a situation once where the entire campus lost power. Management wanted to post a message so visitors to the website and callers on the phone system would be informed of the situation. Sure, lets just pull up the documents on how to do that. Oh wait, it is in SharePoint…

Yes, we hit that once before on our older additional web server and fixed it by upgrading to the latest .NET Framework across the board. These new additional web servers have been verified for .NET versions, and they seem to have the latest other Microsoft KB updates also. Comparing windows update on the main engine and…

Here all change requests have to have the "7 R's" filed out before approval. RAISED the change? REASON for the change? RETURN required from the change? RISKS involved in the Change? RESOURCES are required to deliver the change? RESPONSIBLE to build, test, and implement the change? RELATIONSHIP between this and other…

Doom and gloom or natural selection?

I don't think so. It isn't talking about the monitoring life cycle, but the monitoring and alerting grief when someone, whether team, management or 'other' just says 'turn it all on'. Monitoring is a life cycle, but I hope going through all of these grief stages only has to happen once. Or at the very least can skip a few…

Budget is always an issue for us, especially the last couple of years, and projected for the next 3-4 years as student enrollment is down, the state legislature has cut funds for higher education budgets and isn't allowing state colleges to raise tuition to compensate. We currently have NPM, SAM, NCM, NTM, and Engineer's…

I am actually in a St Paul suburb, so here would be great for me. Duluth is still closer than Chicago too.

One of the radio talk show hosts here noted that local and even some extent local news seems slanted in favor of the opinions of their advertisers. He mentioned the pharmacy industry specifically. I try to not pay attention to adds during news, so I don't know if that is accurate.

I think I need to agree with rschroeder​ on this. Unless and until DEV environments are regularly audited with the same rigorous standards as PROD environments to guarantee there is no prod data in the DEV environment, it needs to be locked down the same or possibly even more than the PROD environment. I say more because I…

I hate chasing down the ghost interfaces. This new job position I am not also running the network and they don't always tell us of device changes. I have to manually hunt for them about once a month right now.

Hmm, no choice for expired certification.

I have no idea what the current SCP test looks like. I took it when it was beta. The beta program had us answer every single possible question they had at the time. I made it through just by working with the products.

I have run into this multiple times in the education environment as well. Faculty and Staff come back from conferences or demos of one sort or another and say we have to have this! But we run into exactly the things you mention. Sometimes support is spotty. Also there is no consideration for training of IT staff on the new…

Thanks rschroeder​. I am going to give this a try and see what we get. Anything is progress at this point I think. It may take me a bit to get to a final version. My interface selection bit is going to be a mess, it won't be nearly as clean as this, but this may be a good start. i.e. select interfaces with very different…

So they should all be wearing go pros!. Live feeds on the internet as well as video for later consumption.

I don't see much in the comments about metrics above that apply to some of what I do. System monitoring, reviewing logs, improving systems, design. Those are things not measured by help desk tickets and the reality is, these things make up the majority of my job. Don't get me wrong, I do get ticket, if they apply to…

Consolidation would help greatly. We are possibly going to run into another problem and consolidation would help, but it might require even more steps. Our Security group is considering requiring regular password changed for any and all accounts, including service accounts enterprise wide. So to prepare for that…

Not true. I could have always called family or friends to check on the house if I got that alert. This time I was lucky, but next time? So in reality, I need a small consumer level SolarWinds instance in my house that will fire alerts off to me based on monitoring various issues when I am out. I wouldn't really be looking…

Scale back to an in booth stationary cam or two? Not to mention at least one in the SolarWinds session.

Our WAN team is scrambling to ramp up VPN licensing and capacity as well as reworking dozens of old SOHO routers that were scheduled for recycling. There is concern about the capacity of the SOHO router and VPN head ends and whether they can take the loads. Although there has been talk of letting everyone who could work…

We have trouble breaking the Silos. The silos all still want to use their own tools and won't use our platform to assist in any troubleshooting.

I have seen this happen here when an additional poller had a service failure so it wasn't polling, but all the nodes it was polling were still showing as UP. This was happening weekly, usually over a weekend for a while, but has not happened recently. I think I really need a special alert when the additional polling engine…

This might also be beneficial in server monitoring. I am thinking of a scenario where some piece of software that is not multi-threaded or can't take advantage of multiple CPUs and just pegs one CPU.

Many certification tests are designed to have 2 or 3 bad answers and 1 in the grey area just to mess with you, then one that is the right one, but looks a heck of a lot like the grey area one just to try and catch you.

Which is why I added the second local news link. But I recall the day very vividly in my mind and much of what is in Wikipedia for that bridge incident matches what I remember from news reports at the time.

Oh, that Murphy guy is really an evil dude. You gif reminds me of a character I played once. Dual class fighter/magic user. Specialized in a bow for the fighter part. You never wanted him to hold a blade of any kind. It seem whenever he used a bow, he got high rolls and lots of crits. Put a blade in his hand and lots of…

Our environment will need to go through a rather large upgrade process. We have to upgrade the OS environment from Windows 2012r2 to Windows 2016 before we can upgrade any product. Then after that, we have so many servers involved, that will take time to upgrade. Main engine, 8 online APEs, plus 2 APEs that were almost…

I have some nodes that don't report alerts that trigger at the node level as well. For our installation, this resource seems hit or miss if the alert trigger has complex dynamic selection rules for what to trigger on.

BUMP! Apparently our database is too big according to support. We have "several tables in excess of 10 million rows". Wouldn't it be nice to offload this to a data warehouse where we can still get requested reports or query for troubleshooting if needed? Wouldn't it be nice to have a smaller database so the whole system…