It seems like many of my more "complex" legacy tools are not setup "right" for what we want to do. I'm always struggling with some of these products. A good example today is HP NNM which is our MPLS, and topology manager. The main goals of the tool are to build a layer 2/3 topology and do server and upstream suppression to avoid alarm floods. Of course none of it works right, and it's a constant main in the rear. We have tried on many occasions to fix this with the help of HP. We have tried numerous suggestions. Finally I got on the phone today with a product manager and got the real story. We can implement some changes which would fix it for now, the downside we'd lose some of our DR capabilities. The product wasn't designed to actually operate in a DR type of way (strange for a market leading product). They have a new version coming out in roughly a year which should fix this, and we'd have to re-architect the infrastructure yet again
Jonah Kowall is the VP of Market Development and Insights at AppDynamics, driving the company’s product roadmap and vision, entry into new markets and providing technology and business insights. Previously 15 years as a practitioner at several startups and larger enterprises focused on infrastructure and operations, security, and performance engineering. In 2011 Jonah changed careers, moving to Gartner to focus on availability and performance monitoring and IT operations management (ITOM).