Adventures of a Technical MasterMind

We monitor all of our hosts with an agent based solution. You get the most flexibility, but the administration and upgrade of agents is time consuming and people intensive. I want to move us towards having both solutions. A development box doesn't need the ability to run complex operational scripts, and we overpay for that monitoring. In the future I hope to re-prioritize the monitoring tools for the needs of the environment. More on this as we move forward with the transition from HP to the Mercury tool.

I am looking at a way to help network support deal with the huge number of log entries coming from the firewalls. I could use a cool tool like splunk, but there is so much data that the cost is high. I am thinking about using a sniffer logging product maybe. I have to talk to more people, but I'm not sure what the best tools are for the job at hand.

Surface computing in depth demo      http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/industry/4217348.html Microsoft Milan site             http://www.microsoft.com/surface/ Really cool stuff from Microsoft. The video is very impressive. I saw the beginnings of this back in the day. There are a couple of cool older projects which remind me of much of the stuff that I see in the video: Bumptop      http://youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ http://www.bumptop.com MIT Media Lab AudioPad     http://youtube.com/watch?v=lxAD1QIv_dw http://www.jamespatten.com/audiopad/index.php Enjoy these cool new pieces of technology.        

I will be attending HP Software Universe in mid June. I am particularly interested in this show for many reasons: Mercury integration, specifically BAC/BPM and SiteScope into the old OV product line. Evolution of NNM. Migration of the 2 Helpdesks and Asset systems to a single HP software system. ITIL v3 changes and what HP is doing to support it. MPLS capabilities across other HP tools. UDDI (Systinet) progress.

I was privileged to speak at the Interop show in Las Vegas. My discussion was on Datacenter Modeling. Specifically around using Dependency Mapping and the CMDB to effect monitoring. The discussion went well, and I was given quite a few interesting questions to answer. Overall I got very good feedback on the session. The rest of the show was decent. The educational content was a bit too high level. I would have liked to have seen some kind of ranking that you typically see in other shows. A good range of rankings would be introductory, executive, intermediate, advanced, expert. The show floor was huge and excellent. I met quite a few interesting vendors, which I am interested in perusing. Overall the show was useful but not amazing. Some of the all day workshops would be more useful and in depth. I would have liked to have attended one of them, but I didn't have the time to do so.

I seem to be working on several configuration management projects at once. Everyone uses a different set of scripts, or tools. No one has any documented information about what they are solving with the systems, and what they want to do. They seem to have started with the "backup the configuration of x" requirement, and evolved into: Monitoring (Error detection, service outages, checking for known problematic conditions) Capacity management Reporting The issue without having any documentation of what the systems intended uses are, as well as current uses would make standardizing on software much easier. I'm battling trying to accomplish this, and it's very slow and painful. I think authority will help force changes, which should start to happen here.

We are using a really cool piece of software called Netbrain. The tool has many overlaps with lots of tools we use and are looking at. It's a really nice "workbench" product for troubleshooting and designing changes. The person who runs the company is incredibly smart, and is a CCIE. It's new and early for this firm, but it's worth checking them out. The product has many interesting ideas and capabilities.