Leon Adato

What is Your IT Legacy?

12/10/18 Where are you in your career arc right now? Trusting simple statistics, I can say that the majority of you are either just starting out, or somewhere in the middle. Relati…

The Cost of (Not) Monitoring

12/05/18 What does a wireless thermometer have in common with ping? Both can keep a business from losing cash. One of the ways businesses stay in business is by keeping a tight rei…

If I Was a Grownup, This is the Essay I’d Write

11/12/18 Recently, my friend Phoummala Schmitt, aka “ExchangeGoddess” and Microsoft Cloud Operations Advocate, wrote about her struggles with imposter syndrome. It’s a good read th…

Directions

10/29/18 My wife called me for the third time, and I could hear that she was working hard to remain calm but was undeniably at the end of her rope. She had missed the freeway exit.…

What I Did (and Learned) On My Coding Vacation

10/17/18 For THWACKcamp 2018, I had a chance to return to a task/skill I haven’t really done much of in a while: programming. That may be a surprise for some people, so let me expl…

Happy IT Pro Day!

09/18/18 As we all know, lists and their thinly-veiled derivatives, listicles, drive social media. Post the “top 5 kinds of belly button lint” and you’ll probably get at least a fe…

Finding Strength in Failure

09/17/18 Recently a coworker was giving a talk and he just froze up. When I asked him about it later, he said, “What happened yesterday has never happened before. It was like my th…

Rear-View Mirror: Looking Back at Four Years as a SolarWinds Head Geek

09/10/18 It’s similar to the thought parents think about their kids: “Where has the time gone?” followed by a rush of memories, each one distinct and unique, carrying their own par…

The Echo Chamber: Visibility and Mapping Webinar

08/06/18 Back in March 2018, I gave an online talk about monitoring, mapping, and data visualizations, in general titled, “If an Application Fails in the Datacenter and No Users Ar…

The Word “Customer” is NSFW

07/13/18 A recent conversation on Twitter struck a nerve with me. The person posited that, “If you’re a sysadmin, you’re in customer service. You may not realise it, but you are th…

The Complexity Conundrum

06/18/18 The person I mentioned in my last two blog posts was back, and I didn’t even bother asking them why. Honestly, I wasn’t sure whether they were here for the technical descr…

Who Protects the Protectors?

06/14/18 Remember the person in my last post who asked me to describe a load balancer? They came back and asked about ASAs. I’m not sure if they really wanted to know, or if they j…