tallyrich · Network Engineer Senior · ✭✭✭✭✭

This was an enjoyable mission - lot's of information.

In my current environment we really don't do a lot to keep things "green." Here's what I've done other places. Air flow is a very vital portion - Hot and Cold rows to direct air for efficient use of air conditioning. Without this there are hot spots, dead spots and vortexes that just eat up air conditioning. Also, make…

Good idea.

There is no perfect solution. I've worked in environments were everything was a discrete box, environments with chassis, environments with no redundancy, those with lot's of redundancy. The key is to really develop your expectations and requirements then build to that. There will always be areas of vulnerability and areas…

Good article and I agree with the order. Policy needs to come first. Having good people and/or tools without policy doesn't work.

That sounds like the definition of some of our currently popular "stars."

Test for scalability Very much a key - while not SQL related I have an example that may help. We had, at a previous position, a programmer that was tasked with building a website that had many fill in the blank questions with drop downs. The drop downs were dependent upon the users AD groups. So he builds this application…

I've worked in several environments where the immediate response was "It's the network" and you spend a whole lot of time testing that theory before anything else can be done. I use that phrase because that's my approach. So often us network guys will get offended and set out to prove it's not the network. I always assume…

Nice spin on PerfStack. Written with the voice of experience.

Security is the highest paid profession for a reason it's also the first head on the chopping block when something goes awry. This is good information, if not very scary, for each of us to keep in mind. Like I've heard so many times security begins at home - at the individual user level. It's important not to point the…

That's basically what Chromebooks are. Office 365, Google Apps, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc. However, still most people by computers by "horsepower" and storage so even people that only do email and web browsing want I7's and multi-terabyte drives. It may happen, but I suspect it will be a while.

Very appropriate discussion. We often pigeon hole ourselves by looking only at performance or only at health. Both are vital to tracking the overall quality of your network and user experiences.

Bring your own is somewhat new to the IT field, but in many other fields people bring their own tools to work and this area will soon have that as a standard as well.

Managing performance has become much more than just up/down monitoring as it was years ago. It's critical as monitoring professionals that we keep ahead of the performance issues and rectify before things break. (or slow down to the point where people see them as broken)

Actually, the red was just an image I downloaded that had the model shown. My actual car is black and my other car is blue and my scooter is red and my snow season (around here 1/2 the year) beater is gold. I don't know why my girlfriend says I have too many cars . . .

Most of my "training" has been on the job - effective, but not necessarily the best way. All of the companies that I have worked for the last 20 or so years have offered online training, but I learn much better with hands on and/or classroom. (probably an age thing) Living in Oklahoma City and Kansas City there were a lot…

Good information - combined with information from ThwackCamp 2017 DevOps takes on new approaches. Its really about perspective, but it also means learning new tools and new (dare I say better) ways of thinking.

Automation is becoming more prevalent, but there really isn't a "Normal" in the IT world. Everything is constantly changing (well one might say that change is the normal) and cycles, so as soon as something seems to be "normal" it will change.

It always amazes me the amount of mistrust of the IT team - between micro managers, time clocks and other oversights some businesses treat their employees as a threat (yes, I know there is that side with security and all, I'm speaking primarily of the IT staff that manages everything) And yet, they will balk as the cost of…

Vulnerability is even more esoteric than threat and most organizations seem to put vulnerability management into t category of "we'll get to it."

And (possibly - I can neither confirm nor deny) in the office. NERF

This makes such a difference - How is this not a standard in the build? Thank you, thank you, thank you @"KMSigma.SWI"

I see your point and think that this should be an option. In our environment the company wants to track the response time from the time the ticket is created to ensure that everyone is monitoring the queues.

We tried Dell's OMNM but had very little luck with it. Even though all of our switches are Dell Force 10 it wouldn't detect most of them. That product has been replaced and support from Dell was pretty non-existent. For SIEM we currently use Securevue - the boss picked it because he loves scripting and getting deep into…

Gotta say I love the meme. I get the reference!!!!

Nope, don't like this one. People already suspect that my brain is either missing or not engaged we don't need them having proof. Besides I think computers already misbehave when we talk badly about them can you imagine the rebellion if they knew what we really thought?

I agree. There's always the worry of tracking, yet we all have our smart phones that track us and we gladly pay many dollars per month for the privilege of being tracked. It's about convenience and people will give up a lot of freedom and information for that convenience.

Very good article to mtgilmore1​'s point I tend to over monitor and then back down. However I do the opposite with alerting as over alerting leads to "Eh, ignore that itis."

Two things that so often get "missed" Baselines Documentation Without baselines how do you know if a system/network/application or anything else is performing better or worse. Without baselines we are left to reactive rather than proactive response. Documentation - get it in writing, or a spreadsheet or chiseled in stone…

Very noble of you gmm1tb​ Congrats rileymat​