The up.time IT Systems Management Blog

Posts Tagged ‘monitoring’

Devotion to Duty

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

Today’s xkcd comic was one that I got a real kick out of.  Picture John McLane as a sysadmin, and you get the picture.  The unstoppable reluctant hero, the right guy in the right place at the wrong time.  The relentless pursuit of availability and performance for the apps they support no matter the effort, that common thread amongst all great sysadmins worth their salt.  But at what cost to the admin and those around them does this come?  Well if they have subpar systems management software, at great cost.  A good toolkit of monitoring/management software and a few point tools for some vendor specific use cases will allow our protagonist to go from being the burnt out, run down admin to becoming the Dicky Fox of IT and jump each morning head first into whatever the world (or the Datacenter) can throw at them.  Systems Management software is to the sysadmin what spinach is to Popeye.  It’s going to give them what they need when the going gets tough.  With detailed drill down data and analytics traversing from Physical to Virtual environments and back becomes something that is done with ease. 

I’m a big fan of tools, my workshop has far more than my wife thinks any sane person should require.  There is a saying, “The right tool for the job”.  You wouldn’t try and screw in a Philips head screw with a Robertson driver (The Robertson, BTW is the possibly best screw head ever.  And a nice little Canadian invention.  Licensing issues kept the world from reaping the benefits of this beauty).  When picking the right tool for the job, you are balancing a few things.  Cost and capabilities being key.  You can buy a $30 screwdriver that only screws in one type of screw, or you can buy a set of screwdrivers for $30 and do all sorts of different screwing.  I’ll tell you though that the $30 single driver will probably never strip and will be able to drive screws until you lose it.  On the other hand, the $10 driver will probably do the trick as well, and provide you with a quality driver.  Where am I going with this?  The systems management space has all kinds of offerings that you can put into your toolbox.  There are expensive tools that do one thing and do it flawlessly.  There are cheap tools that can do a mountain of things, but they don’t excel at any one thing and you’ll end up outgrowing them as you become more proficient with your tools.  Then there are the sweet spot tools, the Rigid’s of the software world.  These tools that do exactly what you require, they do it well and you would be hard pressed to outgrow them.  This is where I feel that up.time fits into the systems management software space.  We’re not the cheap tool, but we’re not the overly expensive Tivoli or HPOV framework either.  We fit into that sweet spot where you are going to get pretty well everything you could ask for and be happy with what it cost you.

So do your sysadmins a favour and thank them by letting them trial up.time.  It will make their life easier and make the you, the IT manager, look like a hero as well with increased productivity and cost-savings. Even if you don’t go with a solution from us, when your sysadmins ask for tools, open your IT wallets for them at least a little.  Some IT spinach will go a long way to keeping the strength in the arms of your Datacenter Popeyes!

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Posted in IT Management, IT operations, management, monitoring, Systems Management, uptime | 3 Comments »

Why Real Winners Keep IT in Focus – A Lesson from Google.

Friday, February 12th, 2010

Ok. You’ve got me – I’m a Google fan. I believe in Google, I think they are better than sliced bread. I even imported a grey Market Google phone the day they released it and switched my carrier to make it happen. Wow, this fanboy is declaring his love for Google on his corporate blog post. End of story right?

Unfortunately not, over the past few weeks Google has gone on a flury of announcements, product launches, and new corporate adventures.  Let’s do a review:

1) Launching the Google Phone and attacking the consumer phone market with a new (for North America) direct sales model

2) Launching Google Buzz and attacking the social media market

3) Launching the new 1 Gigabit broadband internet project

So what’s my beef? I strongly believe that companies you can depend on and come to rely on in your daily operations and life need to keep their core focus. That is, good companies continue to concentrate on doing what they are good at. Losing your core focus to attack 3 of the most tumultuous markets – the Consumer Handset Market, the Social Media Sphere, and the Telecom Industry – seems like excessive risk. Why didn’t Google decide to focus on developing into these monsterous, barb ridden markets one at a time? Is their ambition bigger than their capability? Or are they naive with their newfound power and have already decided that they can take on any market?

So what’s the lesson? How does this relate to systems management?

Partnering with a solutions vendor for IT systems management that doesn’t have a core focus on the market is a mistake that I’ve seen played out time and time again. Practitioners get sucked into platforms designed by vendors who either have a vested interest in their own software stack, have a focus on markets that have nothing to do with the end user (MSP for instance), or are busy building functionality and features that just aren’t really related to managing the infrastructure but are more focused on vanity metrics.

A lack of focus also results in a fragmentation of the solution, as we see in many of the big 4 frameworks. Fragmentation is the careless tacking together and bolting together of 3rd party systems or intellectual property from acquisitions. This makes for very nice marketecture diagrams and collateral - but produces solutions that have clients scratching their heads 12 to 24 months after roll-out thinking “where did all my money go”?

Maybe Google is capable of attacking 3 massive markets at once and is capable of diverting their focus on multiple fronts, but IT systems management and monitoring vendors cannot.

When choosing a vendor, make sure you partner with a young agile company, that lives, breathes and does nothing but create a management solution that works. End of story.

Thanks Google, and good luck.

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Posted in agile, IT Management, Systems Management | 5 Comments »

SpringSource and VMware

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

As most of you know already, VMware has acquired SpringSource for a quite remarkable $420MM. Along with this purchase comes Hyperic, a struggling open source system’s management vendor that was recently force-merged with SpringSource by communal VCs.
Ultimately, this acquisition sets the stage for development and deployment on cloud computing platforms (PaaS), however, our interest lies in the monitoring, measurement, and management of applications running in the cloud. This is an area in which Hyperic conceivably will be used, however, they will need lots of development effort to enhance their cloud offering (Amazon EC2 API calls to instantiate AMI’s isn’t really what I would call ‘cloud leadership’, or ‘cool’).
I am also curious as to how enterprise customers are going to deal with having open source software managing their environments (there still are a huge number of holdouts in this area, which is why Hyperic was struggling).
This acquisition, in the next 12-18 months, doesn’t help VMware compete against Microsoft’s SCOM in heterogeneous environments (physical, virtual, and multiplatform) – which, in my opinion, poses a greater risk to enterprise adoption.

Alex

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Posted in Cloud Virtualization | No Comments »

IT Ain’t Easy Being Green

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

Let’s face it, IT is not environmentally friendly.

The amount of petroleum alone used to create the plastic bits for hardware  is enough to send the average environmentalist to a stress induced early grave.   Add a dash of volatile compounds, sprinkle with some heavy metals and you have your average computer.  Some companies are starting to ‘green’ their operations.  Apple, for example, uses more glass and aluminum than plastics and have reduced the VOC’s and heavy metals in their fabrication processes. Others are following suit.  The good news is that the computer industry in general, for all it’s waste over the years, can go green much sooner than others.  The bad news is that no matter how green we get, we’ll still need to power the datacenters and networks that bring you, amongst other questionable things,  fine pieces of literature, such as this.

This article outlines numbers from a few studies, and suggests that the Internet is on par with the airline industry as far as CO2 emissions are concerned.  What they do not factor is transportation emissions for manufacturing and shipping.  I don’t want to rant here, but it’s the same reason that hybrid vehicles will not save the planet. Just about eveything, these days, manufactured in quantity is assembled from parts sourced from all over the world.  For example, most nickel based batteries are made from nickel mined in Sudbury Ontario Canada.  Last time I checked there are no battery manufacturing plants in Sudbury.  The nickel has to be shipped all over the place before it becomes a battery that, say,  Toyota can put in the Prius — in Japan.  What’s the CO2 cost of a Prius now?

The aforementioned article suggests that, left unchecked, carbon emissions  from Internet usage will increase 280% from current levels by the year 2020.  280 percent!?  The cost of energy certainly is not going down.  If usage patterns stay the same we’ll be paying 2.8X more, if by some miracle energy costs stay flat, just to keep equipment powered up in the next 10 years.   Now, I know 10 years is an eternity in the world of IT, but at this time if you run a tight ship the prospect of a controllable costs spiraling upward might be reason for pause.

So what can we do?

I have a few ideas:

  • Virtualize where possible.
  • Monitor workloads and move them to more efficient platforms when loads are low.
  • Shut off workloads, or hardware altogether when not in use.  If you run a lab environment this is easy!
  • Get smart about sizing your equipment properly.  I’ve seen, too many times, an admin buying WAY more hardware than is required for a project.  Check the old adage of ‘get what you can afford’ and make sure it’s the right decision.
  • Turn up the temperature in your data center by 1-2 degrees.

I’d love to hear your ideas and thoughts on reducing power consumption, and your overall carbon footprint.

I’ll leave you with this thought:  Recently we hooked up a power usage monitoring device (like the Kill-A-Watt)  to a computer running Windows XP.  We fired up VMware server and launched two VM’s.  Power usage was directly correlated to VM workload.  More workload meant more power.  Seems logical right?   Interestingly, power usage dropped when we switched off a VM and moved it’s workload to the one remaining running VM.  Even though this single VM was doing more, less power was being consumed overall.

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Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

IT Performance Enhancing Drugs

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

In the IT world, we systems managers are always looking for a tool,  utility, or gadget that improves performance.  A drug, if you will, that gives us that extra bit of speed,  automates a task, or removes a worry such that we get a bit of extra sleep at night.  Are the backups running properly?  Is the email infrastructure working? Did I remember to shut off the oven?

In the athletic world this is called doping.  I’m a cyclist and follow the world of cycling closely.  Most recently a top cyclist from Belgium, Tom Boonen, tested positive for cocaine use a second time!  Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the definition of insanity ‘doing the same thing multiple times, but expecting a different result each time’?  The professional cycling world is awash with drug testers who, at any given time, will find a pro and test them on the spot. Lance Armstrong writes about this on his Twitter page frequently.  Seriously, he’d be in the middle of dinner and a tester will walk up to him and ask for a sample! How Boonen thought he’d get away with his coke habit a second time is beyond me.  But I digress…

We’re lucky in IT.  We get to try different tools and toys (the drugs) without fear of the ‘testers’.  We try to find that magic bullet that will solve our problems and help us stay ahead of the curve.  But you know as well as I, there is no magic bullet.  Big framework tooling claims to be the be-all, end-all to your systems management concerns, but who has the budget for that?  High-end application monitoring frameworks run from several hundred to several thousand dollars per server.  Add consulting, and endless hours of implementation, with no guarantee that it will ever work properly, and you’ll be well over budget in no time.

So what do you do when budget is tight?  Freeware, right?

I am a supporter of open source software. Freeware has solved a lot of problems for me, big and small.  However in the 15+ years I have been doing this there is one thing you simply cannot hand over to a free, unsupported tool.  You know where I’m going with this, don’t you?

Yep, monitoring.  I must have been insane! Time and time again I had implemented free monitoring tools only to rip them out a year or two down the road when the infrastructure has outpaced or outgrown the solution.  Technology evolves quickly and it can be hard for open-source monitoring applications to keep up. Of course for a small, 2-3 server shop, freeware will work just fine, especially if the operation isn’t growing.  The IT ‘guy’ recommended a free tool, loaded it up and walked away and it’ll probably tick away happily for a long time.   The big monitoring solutions can help but how much more do you want to spend?  How much time do you really have?

If you manage a dynamic environment you need a flexible, affordable monitoring tool that is well supported, that will grow and work with you.  One that can be implemented quickly, that stays ahead of IT evolution.  An IT performance enhancing drug.

So, what is your drug of choice?  I bet you can guess what mine is.

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Posted in monitoring | No Comments »

Proactive IT Systems Management isn’t that Hard….Really

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

A brief introduction:  My name is Dave Mitchell.  I’ve been in the business of delivering enterprise level IT service management for over 15 years.  I call uptime software my home.

I believe that far too many IT Managers are pulling the wool over their employers eyes. You know who you are! The one who runs that dark, mysterious department who’s systems administrators and help desk people run around wearing dirty polo shirts, with a half-empty Starbucks Tall Bold in one hand, and a constantly buzzing Blackberry in the other, screaming “MOVE!” as though the server room is some constantly burning pit of fire that must be put out yesterday. This persona is, in my opinion, a ruse.  A way to ward off prying employees, managers, otherwise evil spirits, that may get in the way of the Sysadmin’s leisure time.  I’m not saying that Mr. Admin isn’t doing his job.  I’m simply suggesting that he could be doing it more efficiently.

So, is this you?  Are you one of those guys who works for a company full of people who don’t understand your job just enough such that you can pull a fast one once in a while?  If so, there’s hope!  It’s not so bad running an open and accessible IT department.  Really.

Here’s a few questions to ask yourself, your department or your IT manager (depending on who you are);

1. Do you have a Service Level Agreement with your customers?  Is it published?  Can you prove you’re hitting it?  Having an SLA is like a contract between your department and your customers (the rest of the company).  It sets their expectations of your group, and allows you to function within them.

2. Is a monitoring system in place?  Does it do more than report up/down status?  Can other employees see system status at a glance?  The ability to report on system status in real time comes in handy when troubleshooting problem, sure. However by allowing other departments visibility into system status you give them the ability to check before opening a ticket. It also gives others a glimpse into that dark, mysterious world!

3. Do you meet with department heads on a regular basis?  I mean every department?  Not just the technical ones?  A brief meeting with Marketing, or Sales management can yield amazingly positive results and prevent potential problems due to lack of communication.

Now,  I’m sure you do all these things and more.  You are not that IT guy, or girl.  You’d be surprised how many of them are out there.  If you know someone at another company who deals with that kind of IT department, please pass this post along.  Tell them Mitchell says there’s hope!  IT isn’t a scary underworld, full of secret rituals and other sorts of geekery.  Sure, we’re proud geeks but that’s no reason (to paraphrase Mr. King) ‘we can’t all just get along’.

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Posted in IT Management | No Comments »