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”)…
A Cornucopia
Before you know it, you have 20, or 50, or 150 monitoring tools in your company. How does that happen? Like most other things happen. Organically, slowly, in response to events on the…
“Logfile Monitoring” – I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means
This is a conversation I have A LOT with clients. They say we want “logfile monitoring” and I am not sure what they mean. So I end up having to unwind all…
Essential
What is “essential” to your monitoring environment? (hey, this *is* a monitoring blog. I could certainly ask that about your kitchen, but that would be a completely different discussion) Seriously – if…
The Four Questions, Part 5
In the first part of this series, I described the four (ok, really five) questions that monitoring professionals are frequently asked. You can read that introduction here. Information on the first question…
#FeatureFriday: What is WMI?
Welcome to “Feature Friday”, a series of (typically short) videos which explain a feature, function, or technique. WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) is, as the name implies, a foundational protocol for Microsoft Windows –…
Nothing is New Under the Sun
Ping. SNMP. WMI. Script. API call. As I’ve elaborated on before, monitoring hasn’t changed much in the last decade or so. To be sure, we’ve gotten better at presenting the information. We’ve found…