Archive for the ‘Best Practices’ Category
Wednesday, November 14th, 2012
Until very recently I was your client: the VP of Marketing for a business consulting firm where I doubled as the in-house IT. It was my job to bring on MSPs who could solve the bigger problems within our infrastructure. This included two complete office moves involving all new cat-6 ...
Posted in Best Practices, MSP | No Comments »
Friday, November 2nd, 2012
One of the great things about being a customer of a SaaS delivered monitoring service like LogicMonitor is that they can get best practices in monitoring of all sorts of technologies without having to have an expert in that technology on staff.
A recent example when LogicMonitor updated some of the ...
Posted in Best Practices, SaaS, Virtualization | No Comments »
Friday, October 5th, 2012
We use snmp a lot, and know it well. However, not everyone of our customers has spent years working with OIDs in ASN.1, MIBs, Access types, and so on - and nor should they. (As we like to say, "Your monitoring solution should make your life easier, not harder.") So ...
Posted in Best Practices, Tips & Troubleshooting | 1 Comment »
Thursday, September 6th, 2012
You released new code with all sorts of new features and improvements. Yay!
Now, after the obvious things like "Does it actually work in production", this is also the time to assess: did it impact my infrastructure performance (and thus my scalability, and thus my scaling costs) in any way.
This is ...
Posted in Application Monitoring, Best Practices, DevOps, SaaS, Tips & Troubleshooting | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 15th, 2012
A company started a trial yesterday, added a bunch of windows hosts, and immediately got warnings triggered that their hosts were "receiving 42 datagrams per second destined to non-listening ports...Check if all services are up and running."
This was across many of their hosts, and was an issue they were unaware ...
Posted in Best Practices, SysAdmins, Tips & Troubleshooting | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 17th, 2012
Your monitoring solution should make your life easier, not harder.
Monitoring should not have to be a full time job.
Data collection, alerting, trending and reporting should all be integrated.
Everyone in IT/Ops should be able to use your monitoring - not just the person that set it up.
Monitoring should tell people about ...
Posted in Best Practices, SaaS, SysAdmins, Tips & Troubleshooting | No Comments »
Monday, July 2nd, 2012
Kablooee! That was the sound I (and many others) heard coming from one of Amazon Web Services (aka, the "cloud") availability zones in Northern Virginia on June 30th (http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/29/amazon-outage-netflix-instagram-pinterest/, http://gigaom.com/cloud/some-of-amazon-web-services-are-down-again/). The sound was a weather-driven event causing one of Amazon's data centers to lose power. And what happens when a ...
Posted in Best Practices, Cloud, Industry Happenings, SaaS, Tips & Troubleshooting | No Comments »
Saturday, June 30th, 2012
Even with a great monitoring system, it can be hard sometimes to keep the noise down. (Indeed, the more powerful the monitoring, the more difficult this can be, as more data is collected and tested, automatically.) And keeping noise down in monitoring is vital, as you do not want staff ...
Posted in Best Practices, SysAdmins, Tips & Troubleshooting | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 19th, 2012
It’s 6 AM. Bob, an entry-level IT engineer walks into a cold, dark, lonely building – flips on the lights, fires up the coffee pot, and boots up. Depending on what he’s about to see on his computer screen, he knows the fate of the free world could rest in ...
Posted in Best Practices, Cloud, MSP, SaaS, SysAdmins, Tips & Troubleshooting | No Comments »
Friday, April 27th, 2012
Recently, we updated some servers from CentOS 5.6 to CentOS 6.2. Of course, we carefully monitored the performance of the hosts, so we can make a comparison about the performance. The one big change we applied with the application of Cent OS 6 was switching from ext3 to ext4 (although as ...
Posted in Best Practices, SysAdmins, Tips & Troubleshooting | No Comments »
