Network

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…

What Makes a Thought Leader?

09/05/18 What do The Guru, The Expert, The Maven, The Trailblazer, The Leading Light, The Practice Leader, The Heavyweight, The Opinion Shaper, and The Influencer all have in commo…

Related Attributes: Syslog, Interface Error Statistics, and Possibly More

08/17/18 Data, data, data. You want all of the data, right? Of course you do. Collecting telemetry and logging data is easy. We all do it and we all use it from time to time. Inter…

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…

How Well Do You Know Your IT Environment?

08/03/18 Do you know what’s in your data center? How about your wide area network (WAN)? If you had to draw a map or produce a list of all the things that are connected to your sys…

Related Attributes: NetFlow and Interface Traffic Statistics

08/02/18 For many engineers, operators, and information security professionals, traffic flow information is a key element to performing both daily and long-term strategic tasks. Th…

Defining Your IT Journey

08/01/18 The IT journey is really nothing more than your career plan or goals that you have for your career. It’s the story of you. I call it the IT Journey because it’s a journey …

Viewing the Network as an Ecosystem

07/20/18 Many of us have or currently operate in a stovepipe or silo IT environment. For some, this may just be a way of professional life. But regardless of how the organizational…

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…

Disaster Recovery – The Postmortem

06/26/18 So you’ve made it through a disaster recovery event. Well done! Whether it was a simulation or an actual recovery, it was possibly a tense and trying time for you and your…

The Effects of Software-Defined IT on Admins and Engineers

06/22/18 When it comes to networking specifically, software-defined networking is a model in which the use of programmability allows IT professionals to increase the performance an…