Any monitoring/systems management product need to have built-in alerting capabilities. Too bad most of them aren’t very useful. The tricky thing is knowing what thresholds to set. The truth of the matter is, you are monitoring so many different things in any application environment, it’s onerous to set up and configure alerts, and it’s almsot [...]
We all knew it was coming, and Amazon EC2 is taking baby steps today with the new Cloud Watch announcement. CPU load, Disk I/O rates, and Network I/O rates are your very bare minimum metrics for monitoring purposes, but it’s a start. As cloud providers and users both get more sophisticated, we’ll expect to see [...]
IT is really a pretty hard job, like it or not, we seem to take abuses from all directions: management, irate customers on the phone, idiot users etc. But you shouldn’t have to put up with additional frustration from the tools you use. The sad part is, many of you are fighting with the management [...]
In a buzzword heavy industry, Cloud Computing has definitely garnered more than its fair share of attention lately. According to a recent InformationWeek article, more than 50% of companies represented by their readers are using or evaluating Cloud-based applications. But the same article revealed some scary numbers about the manageability, or lack there of, for [...]
As Raja stated in his New Year Resolution for Network Engineers post, Virtualization is the new hotness (for very valid reasons), but with it comes new challenges. The interaction of the virtualization and network layers tend to create new classes of problems that manifest in obscure and hard to track ways. More and more IT [...]
In the past decade, processing speed and storage capacity have continued to increase in magnitude and decrease in price so rapidly that every couple of years we need to reassess what is feasible and what is economical using the current technology. This trend is especially true for the x86 platform which has maintained a price-performance [...]