What could you absolutely positively not live without? … Draw a line. Come up with reasons. Know where you stand.
Cute. Except without requirements you can’t draw a line effectively.
So go from there. Start with what you need to accomplish, and then set your must-haves to achieve that goal. Don’t embellish, don’t waffle. Just the essentials.
Draw the line, set the next goal, list the deal-breakers.
Believe it or not, this is an exercise most organizations don’t do (at least for montioring). They start with a (often vague) goal – “Select a NetFlow tool” or “Monitor customer experience for applications”. And then they look for tools that do that.
Before you know it, you have 20, or 50, or 150 tools (I am NOT exaggerating). . You have staff – even whole teams – who invest hundreds of hours getting good using those tools.
And then you get allegiences. And then you get politics.
Companies usually only realise what they could not do without when they are at a point where they have lost that thing.
Then the recriminations begin.
Bringing order to a group of individuals working towards an end goal, revealing the inconsistencies and mysteries surrounding tech of all kinds is something my sceptical/analytical mind savours.
I look forward to picking out evidence from my graphs and my tables to prove my hypothesis. Those developers who blame my infrastructure I simply frown at and present them with evidence to prove that their app needs work…
We all pick up bad habits, its easy with the right tools to set those habits aside and all work towards a sensible, manageable goal.
I wouldn’t be here, right now, doing what i’m doing, if it werent for these tools I use everyday to dig inside the tech.
I could live without it, but i’d be something completely different by now.