petergwilson · Monitoring Specialist · ✭✭✭✭✭

Cheers. I see what they were getting at. I've put Solarwinds into my current client and have been putting together cost saving estimates but I have been adding in all the cost savings, not just the one they were looking for here.

We have a 'Head of IT Security' who is always on at us to patch everything and a management that only allows us to patch one third of the servers each Tuesday morning between 07:00 and 09:00 on a three week cycle (with no overtime). Funny how no one seems to be available out of hours. Systems do get patched though. Just…

Currently several large SANs but we are moving to a Hyper Converged solution on Dell VXRail so the new storage will be a part of that made up of SSD and disks with loads of data deduplication and compression. It will be interesting to see it in action.

Sorry but I couldn't disagree with you more. If the "correct" answer has a typo then it is incorrect. How are we to know it isn't a trick to catch out the unwary (as has happened so many times in the past). If you want to take that route then there are 3 answers which could be correct if you allow for a single character…

Using them to work towards SCP.

Yep, there's been a few like that this month. I was ready to explode when I started to read the pop up box today after answering the question correctly. I've had to do quite a lot on GDPR lately so todays question was a no brainer.

Respond and resolve are two different things. Response can be near instantaneous. Resolution may involve server reboots etc. which need approval from the affected department(s). Network issues need to be carefully managed as restarting a switch may affect multiple departments that don't have any issues and I'm really not…

Monitor everything. It's what you alert on that is important. If you are monitoring everything it makes it easier to diagnose when you have years of data to show what is normal and therefore highlight the abnormal. It is also very useful in trend analysis for disk capacity, memory and CPU requirements. It's also very…

CEOs of IT companies.

'Non-native English speakers'. Does that include Amurkins.

Yes, got that here too. We have one guy who is always getting praised for being here after 18:00. Problem is he is supposed to be here between 10:00 and 18:00 but rarely turns up before 11:00 and then charges overtime for anything after 18:00 (and usually takes well over an hour for lunch). I may have found evidence of…

Yes, totally agree. I can see the payoff. Little effort, get a couple of grand, move on. All they have to do is break in, gather enough info. to pretend to be the boss, find out when he / she is away and pretend to be him / her. Contact finance and get them to 'pay' a supplier (which is actually an account they control. If…

I realised it about 5 minutes into their presentation about the great DR solution they had. The noise of the bubble bursting was quite loud.

Spectre, Meltdown. Not really a surprise. No one does full product testing any more. It's too complex. I wonder how many other vulnerabilities have yet to be discovered.

Would like all. Would settle for the 1st two for now with the other to follow.

That's a dangerous thing to say. If you do you will get everyone asking you to fix whatever IT kit they have. I tell people I look after servers and infrastructure and still get people asking me to look at their PC / tablet. When I say no they get really upset. They don't understand that I really don't know that much about…

Well you say NASA put a car on the moon but did they really do it..........yes.............. probably.

I take the approach that if I monitor everything I will have the data. I can then decide what to stop monitoring when I don't see any need for the data. As the data is stored on a third party's storage I don't care about how much there is. Setting the alerts correctly stops all the noise and the historic data helps with…

Did anyone else think that Google would be listening. I did but I am cynical (and usually proven correct). Big companies have no morals. That's how they became big.

Good stuff there. Where I am working they don't really get it. They do see the need for regular and emergency patching but will only give us a patch window out of hours but won't pay overtime for anyone to do it. They bought Netwrix for GDPR compliance and allowed me to install and configure it but no one looks at the…

The problem is when someone on here says all the answers are on page 5 (see felixforbes 03-Oct-2018 05:55) I guess the MVP bit threw me

Yes. Here we have a fully enabled ticketing system. Hardly a day goes past where some senior manager in IT comes to us asking us to help someone who has circumvented the system. I always ask for the ticket number and get told, "Just fix it and they will open a ticket later". We get measured on tickets (but are told we…

No it doesn't. You did a partial search and got lucky. The question was worded incorrectly and led to two possible answers.

Thanks for clarifying that. That is what I thought and I have been looking for some way to just what you say with disabling components. My main requirement was to be able to disable certain Scheduled Tasks but leave others to be monitored. At present it is all or nothing. I spoke to Kevin Sparenberg about this at London…

Now that is probably the best sign in the world (see what I did there).

No but I do take a "Brave" pill.

Just got a zero on the Food Standards Agency ratings and should be shut down for public safety

Pity Microsoft have no idea of geography. I was in a meeting with the recently about moving some of our stuff to the cloud. We are based in London and I said our data needed to be hosted in the UK. They suggested Dublin. For those of you who don't know, Dublin is the capital of Ireland - a foreign country and certainly NOT…

It's a University run by academics who know nothing about IT but don't listen to us mere mortals who only have Degrees in Computer Science. They have Doctorates and / or are Professors of really useful stuff like medieval studies so know better than us.

A proper Service Catalog signed off by both the business and the IT department would be a good start. It should define SLAs, OLAs, backup strategies and DR. It should also be a living document and be modified by service commissioning and decommissioning processes. See ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library).