01 May 2014
Most Network Management Systems are built to make it easy to poll data via SNMP. But ‘interesting’ data is not always available via SNMP. Sometimes it’s in another format, such as XML. I’m working with ScienceLogic quite a lot recently, and it makes it easy to poll that data, alert on it, and integrate it with all the other sources of data, into dashboards, reports, etc. Here’s a quick walk-through of polling data in XML format, and adding it to ScienceLogic.
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23 Apr 2014
This article is Part 4 in a 12-Part Series.
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22 Apr 2014
A Miktrotik course was held in my area recently, and I thought “They make some really cool stuff, and it’s amazing value. Maybe I should go on the course?” But then I thought: “Who’s going to pay me for Mikrotik expertise? The people who purchase Mikrotik are engineers deploying it themselves, and they don’t have the budget or desire to pay for external consulting resources.”
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13 Apr 2014
I got angry and swore and shouted during a business meeting recently, when I felt someone was doing a poor job. Ultimately this reflected poorly on me, not the other party. I should not have done it, and will strive to do better in future.
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05 Apr 2014
Earlier this year I came across Scalyr, a newer player in the cloud-based log management scene. They’re taking a slightly different approach to products like Loggly and Splunk. I’ve been testing it in my lab - here’s my impressions.
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30 Mar 2014
HP has announced that HP Master ASE holders can now get VIP support. This is supposed to give me:
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29 Mar 2014
SNMP may be outdated, and is definitely unloved, but it still serves a purpose. We’re moving to a new world, with new methods and data structures for interrogating and configuring our network devices. This is a Good Thing, but we’re not there yet, and this leaves us stuck in limbo for trying to solve Real World problems today. Here’s what I found recently when trying to do some network monitoring with IOS-XR devices.
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22 Mar 2014
SDN is the buzzword du jour in the networking industry, but it’s hard to make sense of what it might mean for “normal” people. Here’s my take on what SDN solutions & architectures might look like in the Enterprise space, and the problems that it could solve.
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21 Mar 2014
In New Zealand, one company controls the copper cabling delivered to houses. They sell access to Retail ISPs, at a fixed price. Individual customer connections are mapped through to the ISP, who handles all customer management, upstream access, enhanced services, etc. This means that most people have many options for their ISP, with everyone competing on a common platform. Switching ISP is trivial, and so churn rates are high.
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