Good documentation is critical to the success of any product. Write clear deployment & configuration information, and you’ll have a higher project success rate. Detailed command references and troubleshooting information shorten the time it takes to resolve issues, and reduces support calls. But writing high-quality content is only one part of it. You have to make sure that the documentation is easy to find, and easy to access.
(Read more...)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.
(Read more...)This article is Part 4 in a 12-Part Series.
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.”
(Read more...)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.
(Read more...)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.
(Read more...)A recent Gigaom article asks: “Will transparent caching reshape the future of video on the internet?”
(Read more...)HP has announced that HP Master ASE holders can now get VIP support. This is supposed to give me:
(Read more...)SNMP may be outdated, and is definitely unloved, but it still serves a purpose.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.
(Read more...)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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