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‘Tis the Season to be Jolly – 6 Reasons to Have a Comprehensive Systems Management Solution

Monday, December 20th, 2010

It seams that every year the holiday season starts earlier, that’s right, the holiday retail promotions, the eggnog lattes, the sweet smell of shopping frenzy wafting through the rafters – I personally love it (“theorhetically”).

For every organization looking to maximize the potential of the holiday season, beneath the early marketing and holiday cheer, lies a well tuned IT services campaign. Typically the systems required to deliver holiday service has been planned out well in advance to account for the expected transactional load – and typically with failsafes for applications and systems tuned and written just for the holiday season.

This is the time when many of our clients and prospects rely on their systems management solution to ensure that their applications are performing at their best. The reality is that due to the revenue sensitive nature of systems availability during the holiday season many systems are typically under “change freeze” and are also expected to be under increased loads depending on how they are expected to service their clients over the holiday season.

Clearly at this time of the year a good systems management system is an essential component to the success of any organization hoping to take advantage of the holiday season.

Here’s 6 reasons you want to have a comprehensive monitoring solution in play before the holiday season hits:

  1. Pro-Active systems management solutions ensure that your staff are always going to be alerted when there is an outage. There is no need to keep huge teams of staff on the server room floor  during the holiday season.
  2. A good systems management solution can take pro-active action to repair services or in the case of virtual private clouds to dynamically reconfigure or provision more systems capacity as required. The benefit here is, that even if you do have to have a handful of staff on hand, they won’t have to run around as much to manually monitor the server farm during peak load (boxing day for example). Having more of your staff enjoy the holidays is great for morale, and it’s also great for efficiency in terms of double time – win win.
  3. A good systems management solution can actually monitor different parts of the application stack to help you laser guide your troubleshooting efforts. So if your website is underperforming during the boxing day season, you can easily identify whether it’s the database, middleware, firewall or server platform capacity. Not having to run dozens of point tools to solve the issue saves time for the fix, and fixing the problem quickly means more shoppers can check out in their virtual shopping carts.
  4. A great systems management solution can prioritize alerts based on individual metrics, application context or SLA context. Having this ability means you can ensure that alerts are only fired out at the different tiers of your IT organization at the exact right time. With the increased granularity of the escalated alerts, you can have more people on call instead of on-site, and be sure that the system will only generate a “SEV 1″ type incident if an SLA is about to be violated.
  5. Your systems management solution should also allow you to measure capacity, availability and SLA performance of your systems over the entire season, and to compare them against last years trends. You definitely want the visibility nessecary to make any adjustments for next season.
  6. Lastly, you want a systems management solution that can interface with your infrastructure, whether it’s co-located, distributed over multiple sites, living in a private or possibly a public cloud. The more comprehensive the solution is across all these different infrastructure models, the more you can take advantage of all the benefits that you get from points 1 thru 5.

All of the above, when in place, are great reasons for people in IT to be Jolly along with everybody else.  For those of you who are missing one or more of the aforementioned capabilities, it might be time to start looking at a solution like up.time.

With a simple affordable licensing model, an installation that’s ‘easier than pie’ (watch our 3-min installation video), lots of long-term potential and intrinsic value right out of the box, justifying the move to up.time is going to be a no-brainer. Guess that means you won’t have to hope for Jolly Old Saint Nick to bring you the systems management solution you always dreamed of.

Happy Holidays!

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Notes from the Field (Customer Advisory Board)

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

I’ve been a little negligent on the blogging front lately, as I’ve been travelling (India, a land of contrasts!), so here’s some catch up.

Something that we’ve been working on for a while is our Customer Advisory Board, which is a forum of select up.time customers across many industries and sizes of business.  Discussions include product roadmaps, industry trends, corporate experiences, and how we can jointly solve customer problems in systems management.

Now that we’ve been through a number of meetings with our customers on the board, a tonne of interesting snippets about uptime have come out.  I’m going to highlight a select few in this blog post:

- One thing that continually floors me (and this is our fault) is that the majority of customers underutilize up.time!  We’ve always been big proponents of not modularizing our software and simply including new capabilities in the base package of up.time.  Customers that have been with us for a long time have no idea what new capabilities we have (I guess they ignore the marketing emails [in subsequent conversations, they actually do]).   Even new customers who bought up.time to solve specific problems didn’t spend the time to explore other capabilities of the software.  Our take-away from these calls is the need to make education (and usability) a priority – in fact, we’ve started making YouTube videos demonstrating specific capabilities of up.time.

- This topic came up again, and again: pricing.  Everybody loves our pricing model: “I just count the green lights in the rack and that’s my cost.”  Remember, we don’t charge for virtual instances.  One customer made a funny comment that “with other vendors, trying to calculate the licensing fees makes me feel like I’m doing my taxes.”

- I always feel sheepish about this one, because it just isn’t an exciting differentiator, but ease of use (deployment and operating) keeps coming up.  Many customers said they were happy that up.time was up and running quickly and it allowed them to quickly decide we were the right fit.  One customer told us of a vendor who won’t let them install the software themselves – TWO on-site engineers were required – and only after  the sales PowerPoint slides has been filed away and the evaluation deployment started did the customer find out they needed to buy another database that wasn’t their corporate standard (after the fact).  Didn’t leave a good taste in their mouth and they quickly stopped the other vendor’s proof of concept and went with us.

Glad to have the Customer Advisory Board, and the next few releases are going to bear the fruits of these meetings.

Alex

Posted in Systems Management | 2 Comments »

What’s the Secret Sauce for Systems Management?

Monday, October 18th, 2010

So what’s the secret sauce to achieving a successful systems management deployment?

It all boils down to one word – adoption.

In fact this may be the dirty little secret that all the other vendors don’t want you to know. After all, anyone who sells software would try to say that a flaming logo, a long client list, a huge list of collected metrics, or a huge feature matrix is what people traditionally want to talk about.

Ask yourself, what good are ANY of the above, if the system isn’t focused on maximizing adoption from day 1 of your initiative, to day 300 of your initiative?

What amazes me time and time again, is that when I visit prospect sites, their number one complaint about their existing system is that nobody uses it, nobody trusts the alerts anymore, or that nobody trusts the underlying data because collection is unreliable.  So instead of being that unifying force, the catalyst for change or achieving the “single pane of glass” – the incumbent tool becomes a source of frustration and a wedge between different teams.

Think about it,  if nobody is using the tool, if nobody trusts the tool, or nobody feels that it’s worth the time or effort to try and figure the tool out and use it – all of your investment in the systems management initiative is lost.

And there’s a bunch of really great reasons why nobody is using or adopting those tools, for instance here are some of the questions I hear people rhetorically asked in client and prospect meetings all the time:

What good are systems that are hard to rollout and administer, thus alienating the deployment team?
What good are systems that generate seas of alerts for any given event, thus causing people to create email filters?
What good are systems that don’t ensure that alerts and actions are based on stringently verified trouble conditions, thus causing people to create even more email filters?
What good are systems that don’t allow you to tune those actions and messages to meet your corporate standards, thus resulting in confusing when alerts are actually delivered?
What good are systems that are hard to navigate through on an ad-hoc basis, or are hard to generate reports, thus resulting in users deciding it’s quicker to fire up a niche console tool? (How about to schedule them?)
What good is a system that doesn’t accomodate for your success? i.e you have to throw it out because a new business unit or technology group needs tools outside of your preferred stack, or you acquire other businesses that use a totally different technology stack? (long term adoption, scalability and suitability)
What good is a system that doesn’t provide value to everyone involved in delivering value in IT, from your helpdesk staff, to operations, to capacity, to individual technology silos?

The secret sauce is to drive adoption, and the way to make the secret sauce is to create a product that overcomes the challenges posed by the questions above, and to create an organization that speaks your language, understands your challenges and delivers not only the technology, but the dialogue and guidance that will ensure that your systems management roll-out acts as a catalyst for your success from day 1 to infinity.

Who says that your systems management solution can’t be “nutritious and delicious”?

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Why Freeware Just Doesn’t Cut it for the Mid-Enterprise

Monday, September 13th, 2010

Time for ‘the Ugly Truth’. Freeware just isn’t good enough sometimes.

Here’s 5 of the main characteristics of Freeware tools that make them unsuitable for the mid-enterprise:

  1. Hard to configure out of the box - You want a solution that is intuitive, with a clean interface, that doesn’t require massive amounts of scripting or customization to get started. You definitely wouldn’t want a solution that describes itself as “tricky to configure out of the box – even when you’ve got a good grasp of what’s going on”. Every interface in a good solution should guide you towards the best practices that will save you time and get your project rolling as quickly as possible.
  2. Extremely cumbersome to maintain and operate – You want a solution that’s well thought out, that doesn’t use conf files to keep lists of devices or massive lists of alerts. You want a system that uses rules, that minimizes the number of full time staff hours to operate, and most of all is easy to learn so that all of your staff can have the ability to work with the monitoring solution.
  3. Requires massive customization to achieve results – You want a solution that allows you to monitor your infrastructure right out of the box, with a wide variety of available monitoring capabilities for various heterogenous platforms, and that has the ability to monitor all of your common infrastructure stack elements. You definitely don’t want to learn a whole bunch of scripting to do something basic like webservice, ftp, or database monitoring.
  4. No commercial support – You don’t want to be sifting through knowledgebases, mailing lists, and forums every time you find something that doesn’t seem to make sense when you use a product. You want to be able to pick up the phone, email someone and have experts on the product guide you to a suitable resolution. You need to have this because monitoring is an essential service, the last thing you need is to “wait for someone else who might have had this problem” to reply to your post on a public forum. You definitely don’t want the whole development and support organization to be “one guy”, who “can’t respond to emails directly”. That’s just a supportability nightmare for your selected solution.
  5. No scaleable architecture – As you continue to grow, all the problems above amplify themselves, but more importantly your infrastructure will grow across disparate geographic locations, and freeware tools just don’t have the kind of distributed archticture as per up.time’s Multi Data Center (MDC) functionality to cope with the needs of multi-site reporting and collection. You need to be able to scale across multiple sites, intelligently and efficiently and manage everything from a single unified console.

The result of the above 5 points is that organizations typically experiment with Freeware tools initially, until they realize that the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) due to man hours and massive maintenance required to keep their systems going just doesn’t make any sense. This is when the “aha moment” happens and people decide it’s time to graduate to a more robust tool.

Heck, don’t just take it from me, read this stuff directly from the “getting started guide for beginners” from one of the websites of a freeware tool (emphasis added by me). You’ll instantly see all the warning signs that this may not be what you wanted to sign up for.

“Here are some important things to keep in mind for first-time Nag*** users:

  1. Relax – it’s going to take some time. Don’t expect to be able to get things working exactly the way you want them right off the bat. it’s not that easy.
  2. Use the quickstart instructions. The quickstart installation guide is designed to get most new users up and running with a basic Nag*** setup fairly quickly. Within 20 minutes you can have Nag*** installed and monitoring your local system. Once that’s complete, you can move on to learning how to configure Nag*** to do more.
  3. Read the documentation. Nag*** can be tricky to configure when you’ve got a good grasp of what’s going on, and nearly impossible if you don’t. Make sure you read the documentation (particularly the sections on “Configuring Nag***” and “The Basics”). Save the advanced topics for when you’ve got a good understanding of the basics.
  4. Seek the help of others. If you’ve read the documentation, reviewed the sample config files, and are still having problems, send an email message describing your problems to the nag***-users mailing list. Due to the amount of work that I have to do for this project, I am unable to answer most of the questions that get sent directly to me, so your best source of help is going to be the mailing list. If you’ve done some background reading and you provide a good problem description, odds are that someone will give you some pointers on getting things working properly. “

So you could download a freeware tool and “Relax” because it’s going to “take some time”, or you can download up.time and relax because it’s going to be easier than you thought. The choice is yours.

Don’t worry it’s not like “choose” your own adventure, in the end, whichever way you decide, in the end, up.time always will be the right choice.

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Posted in IT Management, Systems Management | 2 Comments »

NetFlow: Network analytics at your fingertips

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

In my last post I mentioned I would talk about a few topics on a more technical level so today I’ll be talking about our NetFlow integration with a product named Scrutinizer from Plixer. I’ve also created a video introducing the NetFlow integration here.

Would you like the ability to zoom out to the 40,000 foot level and look at how your SLA’s are performing, yet drill down to have a look at who are your worst offending users and applications on your network? How about we take it one step further and have a look at who’s using up the most amount of bandwidth on an individual port on your core switch? Would you believe me if I said you can get all that power and visibility from one tool in the palm of your hand (if you have a mobile with a decent web browser)? Alright, that’s enough from the sales part of me. Yes, you do get all of the above with up.time.

It’s easy to access the NetFlow section from within up.time. By clicking on a server that is on the same network as a NetFlow monitored switch you will see a link in the Graphing section for NetFlow metrics. This gives you direct visibility into the network usage of the server and the top networking applications; and that’s just the default NetFlow view. From there you can slice-and-dice all of the network metrics and flows and find out the top applications, highest bandwidth usage, communication flows, and many other detailed network metrics coming from the server. It provides you with almost infinite drill-down capabilities into detailed low-level network metrics for your network administrators.

The GlobalScan dashboard gives you visibility into your global infrastructure availability, and now we also provide detailed visibility into your network usage and availability as well. You get detailed network analytics without having to drill down into a complicated profiler tool, all from within the up.time interface.

For example: it will show you which server is using up the most amount of bandwidth; and if it was a rogue system serving torrents and saturating your network pipeline up.time would bring that to the surface and show you immediately without requiring hundreds of clicks to get at that data.

With NetFlow Analytics you get higher visibility into what is happening on your network without having to sit there watching the packets fly by and this helps your network team proactively trace patterns before outages can occur. For a look at how this all looks and works feel free to check out our video on NetFlow – click here to check it out.

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Posted in NetFlow Monitoring, Systems Management | 2 Comments »

Fashion Fades, Style is Eternal

Monday, August 9th, 2010

Today, I invoke the immortal words of Yve Saint Laurent.

What does this fashion Icon have to do with systems management? As we all know, like fashion, IT fads come and go and quite often – what’s old is new again. Just think about the cycle for client-server computing over the last 25 years, we went from in fashion (this computing/mainframe), to out of fashion (client-server), to new again (IIAS/PAS/cloud computing).

The technology cycle like the fashion cycle is fraught with danger, just like a fashionista, we have to make sure we avoid becoming “just another fashion victim”, the owner of a technology “knockoff”, or even worse, end up with “mutton dressed as lamb”. We are constantly changing up the deck, in terms of what technologies de jour we are using to deliver our services.

The nice thing about having a good comprehensive systems management solution is that you really shouldn’t have to worry about what the latests fad is. Regardless of what technology is “in”, the flavor of the week should be easily monitored – especially by a product with an extensible plugin-framework, by a product that’s easy to use and configure, backed by an organization that’s forward looking and agile.

In the same way that people “in the know” can feel assured that Chanel, Prada, or Mark Jacobs are keeping abreast of the latest trends in fashion and ensuring that their product lines provide all the fundamentals for a current and complete wardrobe, you want a systems management toolkit that does the same in terms of supporting your data center initiatives, rationalizing your tool sets, and acting as a catalyst to align teams across silos.

For instance in today’s data center environment, some fundamental pieces you should have in your wardrobe today:

Think of a good systems management tool as a really good wallet – that must-have, timeless and fully functional, fashion accessory for the data-center that just keeps everything “together”.

So, there you have it, Fashion Fades, Style is Eternal. For more about my perspective on staying “minty fresh”, see my previous blog post here.

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5 Tips for Evaluating IT Systems Management Software

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010

First off, I apologize as it’s been a while since my last post. The allure of the summer patio and the beautiful weather has taken its toll. But I’m back and ready to roll…

As I chat with customers and prospects at uptime software, it became clear that most IT professionals would find a  “Systems Management and Server Monitoring Evaluation Guide” very useful. So with that in mind, this blog is themed around how to better evaluate systems management and server monitoring software. We’ve found that our mid-enterprise customers (companies that have between 50-2,500 servers) have some common best practices when it comes to  evaluating various packages to monitor and manage their environment. So, without further ado, here are my “5 Tips For Evaluating IT Systems Management Software:”

1. Applications are becoming dynamic and complicated. Can your monitoring and performance software handle it?

Historically, it’s generally been fairly easy to monitor applications.  They sat on individual pieces of hardware and were relatively siloed.  Nowadays, applications are increasingly componentized and are being abstracted from the underlying hardware platforms.  Witness the prevalence of virtualizationtechnologies such as VMware, AIX LPARs, and Solaris zones, all of which are making great strides in widespread adoption.  It is now incumbent on systems managementvendors to understand these virtualization technologies in great detail and how they impact application monitoring and performance. Remember, your systems management and application monitoring tool should make application monitoring easier for you, not more complicated.

2. Heterogeneous platforms (Virtual, Physical and even Cloud) are the new normal. Your systems management software needs to be able to scale across them all.

In a mid-enterpriseshop, it’s highly unlikely that you’re a single platform and OS.  You’ll need to deal with hardware platforms of many vintages and architectures (and add in the network too).  Mix in virtualization and cloud and if you don’t have a fully features management and monitoring tool, you’re in for a world of grief. (shameless plug -  up.time can oversee all the platforms and environments). So, it’s best to ensure that the tools you are considering can cover all your platforms, both today and tomorrow.

3. Are you future proofing?  What about new technologies?

As technologies change, is your systems management tool ready to grow with you?  Virtualization was, and continues to be, a big disruptor and yet many vendors took years to understand how to introspect and monitor virtual environments.  With the advent of cloud and its adoption, a very similar problem is occurring again.  Can you get a single pane-of-glass for monitoring and managing what we call P-V-C (the physical, virtual, and cloud worlds) together?

4. Can you quickly evaluate and deploy?  Do you need lots of professional services?  Is the tool administration costing you an FTE?

We appreciate that extra time is something you probably don’t have the luxury of. So, at uptime software, we designed up.time to get up and running in under 15 minutes  We want to help you solve problems right away, not send a flock of consultants on-site to bleed you to death.  If you’ve had any experience with consultants (or lawyers), you’ll know what I mean.  I’ve heard our customers and prospects say loud and clear, that they don’t want a full-time admin to babysit and administer their monitoring tool. Is the solution you’re evaluating going to save you time or cost you an FTE to manage it?

5. The Last Tip is the most important. Trial, trial and ….trial. Before you talk to salespeople.

Make sure you fully trial the software before you get too far in the buying process. Don’t get caught being sold to through fancy demos, vapor-ware, and PowerPoint’s. Trial the tool, see what it does and how it acts in your environment. Sure, the marketing says how easy the tool is to use and install, and how deep the metrics are. Believe that and I have some swampland in Florida you might be interested in. If the trial is complicated, frustrating, and doesn’t do what you want, don’t expect the purchased tool to be any better. In fact, in most cases, it’s worse. Remember, it’s up to you to ensure your systems management tool is the right fit for your environment and needs. This is exactly why we provide a free trial at up.time. You don’t need to talk to a salesperson to get it, just download it straight off our website. You’ll be able to get up.time monitoringand reporting in less than 15 minutes! We want to you trial up.time, test it, put it through the paces in your environment. So far, up.time has over 700 customers in 32 countries because our trial let’s people see how up.time works in real-life, not on some fancy and wishful thinking demo.

We know that selecting a Systems Monitoring and Management Vendor can be time consuming. It’s also difficult to determine how to prioritize your needs. Therefore, we created a Systems Monitoring and Management Evaluation Checklist. This checklist is designed to help IT Managers and Administrators as they search for the right solution. Rather than starting from a blank sheet of paper, you can adapt the checklist to fit your needs, as it’s intended to be a generic list that can be updated, expanded and customized depending on your requirements. Edit and modify each of the items as you see fit. Also – if you are evaluating up.time (hint, hint), we’ve pre-populated a checklist with everything up.time has to offer. Click here to download a pdf copy or word document.

Interested in finding out more?  Check out our NEW Evaluation Center!

Alex

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Posted in Systems Management | 1 Comment »

Cheers to sysadmins

Friday, July 30th, 2010

I just wanted to send a quick little note to our favourite kind of individual: the sysadmin.  Congratulate yourselves today and enjoy “System Administrator Appreciation Day.”  Embrace the Green status on your NOC screen, cherish the idle service desk queue, and relax about the balanced workloads.

Get yourself a large coffee and kick up the shoes for a bit.

Cheers from us at uptime.

Alex

Posted in Systems Management | 1 Comment »

Netflow | Network Data You Can Actually Use

Monday, June 21st, 2010

In the latest release of up.time there are a whole bunch of goodies, but I’m going to take a moment to talk about one specific feature that you should all be aware about, our Netflow capabilities.

To understand Netflow, let’s first start with how we (as in anyone who cares about the network) would do diagnostics and troubleshooting any kind of network error in the past. Trust me, I used to do this as a junior network engineer to pay my way through school, and I know all too well the pain of what I describe below.

First, you would go to your console tools, run those, and examine point stats. Because the point stats are “just the state of the network at the point in time”, and because the consoles are so hard to navigate by text, trying to find out trouble areas or diagnose distributed outages would be like finding a “needle in a haystack”.

Second, ok we’ve figured out that the point in time stats are a pain, if we’ve figured anything out, maybe we would now switch to something with some historical stats like MRTG or Cricket. The bad thing about these tools, they display static graphs over fixed time periods, trying to do any ad-hoc analysis is impossible. Even worse, these tools sort of illuminate key metrics like throughput, capacity utilization, dropped frames, but once you get to that level of figuring out which connections are being flogged, what do you do next? You have zero visibility into the traffic, the applications or any context over why that port or set of ports is underperforming or saturated.

Third, we bring out the BFG (Big !@#$%^& GUN). The passive network profiling tool. You configure the spanning port on the switch or router, you hook up a big honking expensive passive network profiler and what do you do? You WAIT. You wait for this network data to get collected, then you spend hours pouring over the ultra granular network profiling data in hopes of figuring out what is happing on your network.

Does the above sound like sanity or insanity? By the time you deploy the BFG, maybe your users are done watching the world cup viral videos, or maybe the DDOS attack is over.

Let me tell you what you need instead:

You need to be able to alerted on general network outages and performance issues in as they occur
You need to be able to drill down into network traffic breakdowns on network devices AND servers
You need to be able to pro-actively have a network dashboard that focuses less on profiling type operations, and more on network threats, misconfigurations and common applications that cause trouble on the network
You need to be able to perform ad-hoc analysis at will, on demand to rapidly gain insight into what’s going on.

This is what up.time’s netflow capabilities provide. If you want to see more, join one of our what’s new webinars and I’ll be happy to take you on a tour. Click here to register.

Here’s some eye candy to whet your appetite:

up.time NetFlow Monitoring up.time NetFlow Dashboard

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Posted in Systems Management, uptime | 1 Comment »

Joy is up.time

Monday, June 7th, 2010

This morning I’ve decided to rip BMW’s new tag line “Joy is BMW”. As any of you who follow my blog posts, you know I eat tag lines for breakfast.

So what’s the question Alex? Yes, my old antics – what could this possibly have to do with systems management?

It’s amazing how the typical car history of any fire breathing male on the planet matches the buying patterns for systems management tools. Ok trust me, I haven’t graduated to hardcore drug use, this actually makes a lot of sense if you follow me.

In the case of the car buying,  just like purchasing a systems management tool, you are making a huge investment and hoping that your purchase meets your needs. If the purchase results in a solution that  isn’t reliable or isn’t practical for your needs, you are potentially putting yourself in a “hard place” because you won’t have budget to get yourself into another “vehicle” for a while.

Let’s use my personal car history (don’t judge me, I like fast 2 door cars) and analyze what each car would represent in terms of the systems management world.

Vehicle Representative Monitoring Solution
Ford Probe GT
“fully customized fast and furious style - custom giant turbocharger”		 Probe GT Freeware tools
Hyundai Tiburon GT
“Bone stock – reliable – not very fast”		 Tiburon Niche Tools
BMW 335i Coupe
“Break Neck Fast, Well Built, Beautiful aesthetics,practical,  just works”		 335i up.time
Audi R8
“Fast on a track, Well Built, Super Expensive, Impractical”
(** no I don’t own this car yet, this is for illustrative purposes)		   Big 4/Legacy Vendors

So just how does the maturity process in buying cars map to the maturity process in buying systems management tools?

Take my first car. I had a lot of time on my hands at that point in my life. First job, on top of the world, no responsibilities, I was content to take my stock Ford Probe GT  and customize it like there was no tomorrow. I had to totally rewire the engine, add a turbocharger and make it the envy of wannabe racers world wide. You could find me customizing something, painting something, tuning something on any given weekend. The real problem – reliability of the vehicle suffered, and I started to run out of time maintining the mods, and slowly the shiny afterglow of having a totally “customized” solution wore off.  This is exactly what happens when you use freeware tools as your monitoring tool, inevitably the tooling just can’t keep up as your needs grow, you end up scripting or modding conf files till you are pulling your hair out. Suddenly you’re yearning for a more mature solution.

So in my quest for the perfect car, I turned to my next car purchase. The Hyundai Tiburon. I vowed never to be modding or doing huge maintenance, this next car would have boy racer DNA. Well unfortunately I got tricked by the marketing, the Tiburon was a “fast looking” car. To it’s credit it was very reliable, and got the job done in terms of looking the part. But ultimately it didn’t meet my needs, which was the desire to have a VERY FAST vehicle, that was a joy to drive, was reliable, wasn’t flashy and didn’t require modifications of any kind. Live and learn. In this way, some people graduate from freeware to niche tools that only meet some of their needs, yes they are careful to avoid the maintenance headaches, but maybe they end up with a platform that can ONLY monitor Microsoft solutions for instance. Eventually you’ll realize you got half way there but your needs aren’t being met. You need the right systems and server monitoring tool that can grow with your needs.

They say 3 times is a charm, and when it comes to my car history, I can happily say this cliche is totally right. The 335i is the perfect balance of practicality, reliability, and breakneck speed. The 2 turbochargers under the hood growl when I want them to, or the car runs deceptively quiet if I’m going through your grandmas neighbourhood. It’s got plenty of trunk space, and it doesn’t cry out “I want attention” (like cars made by Audi these days IMHO). So not only is the vehicle a joy to drive, everything fits my needs, it just feels right every time I get into the drivers seat. This is exactly what it feels like when you install up.time. If you don’t believe me give it a try.

So what’s the future for this boy racer? Have I found my dream car? Yes, for now. But, you can bet, as with those big 4 frameworks, that if I were to buy an Audi R8, I’d be dropping a wad of cash for a car that just isn’t practical for everyday use. Sure it would be great to have everything the R8 has to offer today, but it’s more than my needs (I’m not having my mid life crisis yet for instance). Frankly, it would require me to have multiple vehicles and I would end up keeping my 335i as my daily driver. Sound familiar? Why have a best of breed/fragmented/patchwork of solutions when we all want to rationalize our garage/toolsets?

Don’t make the mistake of buying the R8 before you are ready to have a 4 car garage, get up.time and find out what real joy in systems management and monitoring is all all about.

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Posted in Systems Management | 4 Comments »

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