Monitoring For Managers—a New Monthly Series

Executive Summary:

If you’re a manager with questions about monitoring, the Monitoring For Managers forum is the place to ask them and get answers.

Engineering Details

Hang around with IT folks for anything longer than your typical stand-up meeting and you’re likely to hear some variation of “Managers! Am I right?” Like salespeople, managers are one of those roles we who make our living in tech love to hate (or at least poke fun at). And it’s all fun and games until it’s time for your yearly review.

As folks who design, deploy, and maintain monitoring solutions, we’ve got a choice: we can continue to dismiss and diminish people who don’t know about our discipline; or we can take the time to educate and inform.

It’s in this spirit we created a session at THWACKcamp 2020 geared to answering the technical questions managers—those folks who both lead and represent the boots-on-the-ground monitoring engineers—might have. Anything from “What’s this SNMP stuff I keep hearing about?” to “Why does my staff keep nagging me to move our database off RAID5?” to “How do I make a compelling case for application tracing to my leadership team?”

The response to the session was incredible. And gratifying. And slightly overwhelming. There were far more questions than I could answer in the one 30-minute THWACKcamp session. Back then, I committed publicly to answering every single question I was asked*. Rather than make everyone wait until THWACKcamp 2021, I decided to make it a monthly series on thwack.com. You can find it here: https://thwack.solarwinds.com/water-cooler/f/monitoringformanagers

Each month I’ll take one of the questions—your questions, if you’re a manager—and address them. Sometimes I’ll just write a response. Other times I’ll post a video or audio note (with captions). I’m also planning to have guests drop by, either to author their own set of answers, or join me to make a point.

Now is the time to head over to the Monitoring For Managers forum (https://thwack.solarwinds.com/water-cooler/f/monitoringformanagers), tweak your notification preferences (turning them on or off; I’m not here to judge), and maybe even share the URL with the special managers in your life. And if you have questions you’d like me to address, feel free to drop me a line here (adatole).

* the ones related to monitoring. I’m still not answering questions about the flight speed of an unladen African swallow.