There’s Always That One Guy… How to Build Team Accountability and Reduce Firefighting.

Change control. In theory it works. However, there’s always one person who thinks the process doesn’t apply to them. Their justification for going rogue may sound something like, “There’s no time to wait, this has to be done now,” and, “This is a small change, it won’t impact anything else,” or maybe, “This change will make things better.”

But at the end of the day, those changes inevitably end up crashing a service, slowing application performance, or even worse, opening new vulnerabilities. The call will come in, something’s broken and magically no one will know why on earth it’s happening and, they certainly won’t be able to remember if any changes occurred…or who made a change. There goes the rest of your day, looking for the root cause of an issue created by one of your own coworkers.

Recently, Head GeeksTm Thomas LaRock sqlrockstar and Leon Adato adatole hosted a THWACKcampTm session on this exact topic. In their scenario the culprit was “Brad the DBA.” At SolarWinds, we understand this all-too-common scenario and have a tool designed to help.

SolarWindsRegistered Server Configuration Monitor (SCM) provides an easy-to-use and affordable way to track when server or application configuration changes are being made, who’s making the changes, and what the differences are between the old configuration and the new configuration. It detects, tracks, and alerts on changes to things like hardware, software, operating systems, text and binary files, Window Registry, and script outputs on WindowsRegistered and LinuxRegistered servers.

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Additionally, SCM is an Orion Platform-based module, meaning you can quickly correlate configuration changes with infrastructure and application performance metrics in a single view. Helping confirm or illuminate the possibility of a configuration change being the culprit.

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These capabilities help provide you with the visibility needed to not only remediate issues faster but, also hold non-process-abiding team members accountable for their actions. If you’re tired of the shenanigans created by your colleagues not following the change control process for your servers and applications, check out a free, 30-day trial of Server Configuration Monitor. And just for fun, if you have a good story of how “Brad” broke your day, feel free to share below!

Parents
  • So true.  Hopefully you only have one of those.  They always have some super funky way of "making it work" that doesn't work with anything else and causes all kinds of problems in other areas (which don't effect them so they are fine with it - they just put an SEP field around it).

Comment
  • So true.  Hopefully you only have one of those.  They always have some super funky way of "making it work" that doesn't work with anything else and causes all kinds of problems in other areas (which don't effect them so they are fine with it - they just put an SEP field around it).

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Thwack - Symbolize TM, R, and C