Adventures of a Technical MasterMind

Initially we deployed VOIP as a interoffice communication savings. With the presence in India we have, and its growth it has some huge savings attached to it. We then decided to modernize the call centers that we have deployed. That meant we were deploying Cisco solutions that were very network centric to function using call manager, and the rest of the suite. In the next phase we realized that we were spending a huge amount of money on conference calling services. We use a LOT from every vendor you can think of. We even max out some of our vendors when we run conference calls for earnings periods. We started to implement Cisco Meetingplace. The product has been working well, and we are monitoring the same way we monitor any set of cisco devices, and a few windows machines. One of our CEOs was on a conference call and it started to have voice quality issues. That they brought up the fact that we are missing a whole bunch of ways to debug and fix issues relating to voice and o...

We are having somewhat of an issue getting visibility properly across the network traffic. Netflow is useful, but limited in the data it can give you. There are more and more products which really need to see the traffic in order to work properly. I came up with a business case on why we need to do this back in June. Coradiant monitoring of the traffic We seem to miss pockets, and we cannot get a proper view of the backend web server response and quality by looking at data on the edge of the datacenter. VOIP monitoring This will be the topic of my next post Sniffing and debugging issues IDS deployment We currently have scattered IDS deployments, which we need to centralize. It's finally gotten to the point where we want to implement it. One of our network guys came up with a nice design using the Apcon switches, and cisco switches to help with multiplexing the data more easily. This will allow us to implement monitoring and spanning during the day without reconfiguring product...

Due to recent organizational changes, I am working closely with other parts of my business. At the same time we are buying another large company. We now have 3 strategies involved in the company that I find very interesting and conflicting at the same time. I know that I feel open for change regardless of direction. It just needs to make sense financially and have a solid technological foundation. It needs to meet the needs of the consumers of our tools internally and externally. One of our divisions moved off IBM tools for server monitoring, to modified open source tools. The products are cost effective in terms of deployment to many machines, but they need full time developers on staff. My team uses mostly HP OV products on the systems, but we use a lot of other tools for other areas. We have a very good deal from HP on the agent pricing. The company we are buying is a big IBM shop, all they use is IBM. This means we have 3 camps: Open/Free Closed/Diverse Closed/Single Vend...

We have a bunch of devices which are "appliances" the vendor has slowly refreshed the hardware. Our devices are 2.5 years old, and the new devices came out earlier this year. Now the new revisions of the software are not going to have all of the features on the "older" appliances. The machines are just older CPUs and less memory. They want to charge me something, I haven't seen the quote yet, to upgrade the appliances. I think they will charge me more than just the cost of the new hardware. I'm kind of upset about the strategy to get some sales for the end of the year…. We still pay maintenance, which should include all of the upgrades we need… Not nice!

We have a serious issue around capacity management, and what the options are for doing a good job in capacity management. I feel there are the following types of methodologies going in order from fewest to most. Ignore capacity and just fight the fires as they arise. Pros: Easy, no additional work involved. Cons: Unhappy customers, lots of fires, no way to budget for growth or system changes. Treat capacity as a overall metric across unrelated systems, networks, and software. Pros: Gives you a overall idea of the usage of your capacity. Cons: No actionable information, thus you don't actually fix any capacity issues. Treat capacity as alarms, where we get a message and a ticket based on a capacity being passed. Pros: Gives you actionable alarms on capacity problems. Cons: Doesn't give you any priority, or prevent the alarms from being ignored (crying wolf). Treat capacity as reports. Pros: Gives you an idea of what you must take action on. Cons: No idea when you will run out o...

Along my path as an IT god J I have found myself going back and forth on the appliance model: Year 2000:     Why would I want to buy an appliance, when it's the same software, and I can't choose the exact form factor or implementation of hardware? Year 2003:     I can just buy this box and plug it in and I have a solution. When I have a problem I just swap out the box and load a config file onto it. Year 2005:     If I use my own hardware I can use the same box for 5 things at once, thus allowing the box to do more with the same power and space consumption. Especially when I introduce virtualization. Year 2007:     I'm so sick of vendors blaming hardware, and having the battles between hardware and software vendors. The worst is when you have IBM, Microsoft, and vendor x all fighting. I also like the fact that I know my appliance will be in warranty, because it's a single renewal. Not to mention some of these appliance makers that have been around for a while are...

Open source is awesome, weather you need a swiss army knife, or some glue between two solutions that don't quite mesh the way you need them. It's also great for analysis and basic tasks that you need at your fingertips. Its versatile and deep in functionality. The best part, is the cost (aside from the legal ramifications of using it commercially). The downside is that working in a large complex environment where I have responsibility across so much diversity and complexity is that many of my needs are not fulfilled to warrant a platform selection: Manageability Policy Templates Audits Grouping Deployment Ssh telnet wmi remote command Scale Distributed systems globally Failover Reporting Complex reporting needs Logging sophistication Most of these issues are completely missed in most open source tools, as it turns a swiss army knife into a nuclear weapon. There is nothing wrong with it, but either companies need to understand and implement these around open source tools (...