(NOTE: This is an OLD post from THWACK, which I’m re-posting here for posterity. Much about the SCP program has changed since writing this, and you can expect an updated post soon.)…
#FeatureFriday: Improving Alerts with Query Execution Plans
Welcome to “Feature Friday”, a series of (typically short) videos which explain a feature, function, or technique. Alerts are, for many monitoring engineers, the bread-and-butter of their job. What many fail to recognize…
Blueprint: The Evolution of the Network, Part 2
NOTE: This article originally appeared here. If you’re not prepared for the future of networking, you’re already behind. That may sound harsh, but it’s true. Given the speed at which technology evolves…
Change is Good… For Other People
Things really do stay the same more than they change. And I’ll argue that they do so because we want them to stay the same. When you are responsible for monitoring thousands of…
Blueprint: The Evolution of the Network, Part 1
NOTE: This article originally appeared here. Learn from the past, live in the present and prepare for the future. While this may sound like it belongs hanging on a high school guidance…
It’s Not About What Happened
“I call bullshit,” he said with authority. “it it couldn’t have happened like that. Let’s move on to something real.” And just like that, he missed the most important part. Because sometimes…
When It Comes to System Outages, Don’t Prepare For the Worst
NOTE: This article originally appeared here. During the 2015 World Cup soccer competition, Nate Silver and the psychic witches he keeps in his basement — because how else could he make the…
“Nice to Have” is Relative
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….
Are We There Yet? Are We There Yet? Are We…
How often you request information from a target device (commonly known as the polling cycle) is one of the fine arts of monitoring design, and one of the things that requires the…
When, Not What, Defines Today’s Networking Career
Back in December, Cisco filed a lawsuit against Arista Networks because Arista’s network device operating system, EOS, was too similar to Cisco’s beloved IOS. This caused Tom Hollingsworth (a.k.a. “The Networking Nerd”)…