lhoyle · Network Operations Admin III

I'll be sure to pass this along to my DB friends. Good article.

Thanks!

Alerting on CPU utilization no, WAN utilization, YES (at my previous job, due to a latency sensitive primary business app). We would see CPU utilization charts during the business days, and I think we all realized the high CPU was at night when maintenance and re-indexing cycles ran.

Exactly what I was thinking!

In my view a good manager, not just IT ops, encourages communication and collaboration. This is an essential skill with diverse skill sets in most medium to large shops.

We had a very nice alert system. The first alert came out immediately to the on-call phone (we used a directory number in Call Manager, and it was changed every Friday morning at 0800 to the cell of the on-call), then 5 minutes later to the on-call; and if it still was not acknowledged after 10 minutes, it went to the…

This might be the worst worded question ever.

Sadly, it is verbotten to show. But, my lair does contain the requisite pictures of my family and favorite sports teams. Today, I am actually at a remote site working on a project.

It seems that it is always driven by the Information Security people (who own the log servers where I work), who are in turn advised by legal.

We use VNQM.

Speaking of toll booths, I was in NY/NJ for Hurricane Sandy (Search and Rescue volunteer) and I was shocked that the toll booths were still equipped with swinging gates. We lost those in Oklahoma YEARS ago. the RFID is so good now that before a new turnpike (toll road) opened, they ran a test car through at 150mph and it…

This is bookmarked for sure. Great read and very informative.

I've used several different help desk systems and as long as they have a good search feature, they will be successful. There's no reason to re-invent the wheel.

I had a SCP when I was the company's SME for SW, but now that another team took over SW and took away my support account, I let mine expire. At least I know enough to ask specific questions for stuff I need them to do to support my team. 

From what I understand, our log gathering system is monitored only by the security folks and they have their own alarms/alerts setup. In my operations group we mainly use live logging to troubleshoot connectivity issues when starting new things up and looking at stuff that breaks down.

I am just as concerned with East-West, and luckily the Security department folks bought some extra IPS's that we can put in as a bump on the wire for the different buildings on our campus. We spent a lot of time and energy protecting the outer doors, but the id10t that brings his home laptop to the office and plugs it in…

Our network does not utilize VoIP over the slower WAN links, but we often get help desk tickets for our intranet being "slow". I can see where IP SLA would be very beneficial for looking at http from those remote sites.

Thank you!

All of our logs go one place - and that is monitored by several sets of eyes. I would guess that there is dual control on everything to do with the beast.

Thank you jim.couch@loves.com

My former employer was NO to the cloud due to tribal sovereignty. What belongs to the tribe must remain on tribal owned land. Therefore, the cloud was not an option. My current employer advertises a "cloud" to our employees, but in fact it is just co-located at our data center and a co-lo datacenter.

Thank you!

We use Solarwinds for a lot of our monitoring and alerting!

My employer has taken MANY steps to keep the fox out of the hen house. Increased head count, specific individuals recruited, and all of the tools that we need. It is taken very seriously.

I only wish our help desk followed the same set of procedures ALL of the time. Too many middle of the night calls and they have already done things that we have expressed to them NOT TO EVER DO.

I am trying to keep up by trying new skills. I figure the more broad my skill set is, I can be of more value to my employer.

At my former employer, our main app was very latency sensitive. Rather than throwing bandwidth at the issue, we utilized NTA to find folks doing things they shouldn't be doing during peak periods, like YouTube (we could not block it due to our employer putting stuff out there) and the biggest culprit - SCCM. We ended up…

We have a pallet that all technology goes into for proper recycling. Also, we only have virtual hosts and AWS instances. Spinning up CoLo's is actually pretty easy; just order the circuits and its only a small number of racks of gear - compared to where we were 5 years ago with filled data centers.

Absolutely pitiful Store Help Desk personnel completely disregarding procedures and moving cables around on network devices trying to get one device back working - when it is clearly the one device that is mis-behaving; NOT the network. Then we get a 3am call and try to figure out everything that has been moved because now…