A Technical Manager's Perspective

Event Monitoring and Support Tools

I have responsibility for both the Unix Operations and the Windows Operation within our company, and I struggle to find tools that work well in both environments. Both groups work autonomously and do a great job of supporting their respective environments, however as our responsibilities grow, I would like to find consistent tools for maintaining, monitoring and supporting our environments.

Two tools that do work in both environments are BMC Patrol for performance gathering and HP Openview for event notification and monitoring. We are not using Openview to monitor our network, instead we use it for system and event monitoring. We have a decent baseline of monitored events, however we struggle with event escalation especially when new errors or a new event occurs. We have installed IBM Director on the IBM nodes and it passes Hardware events to Openview, and we have scripted certain events which also hand off to Openview. There still is a lot of refinement needed in our process as many events enter Openview and are not reacted to because the criticality level is identified incorrectly or the followup and escalation are not defined in Openview. We are looking to reduce the number of system outages that impact our user community by improving our event escalation and notification.

Another tool that is in use in on our Unix platform is Tripwire.Tripwire is an auditing tool that will identify changes in files and will enable you to better track changes in your environment. We have started looking the Tripwire on the Wintel side and hope to have it deployed within a month.

I am open to others thoughts and experiences surrounding event monitoring and event notification in a multi-OS environment and would be glad to discuss this in detail.

Technorati : Infrastructure, Microsoft, Support, System Administration, Unix

Are you a leader ?

My question to you is --- Are you a leader ?

You do not have to be a Manager, Director, VP or higher to be a leader. We find leaders in every organization at every level. You can be the leader of your group, or the go-to-guy on a topic, or the consistent dependable person that everyone knows they can count on. I feel that you lead by your actions and examples and not by your knowledge or position.

George Ambler from The Practice of Leadership writes that "Culture is the shadow of the leader" and I agree with him, and I know that at times it is hard to change the culture of a company, especially when the people in senior positions adopt a "do as I say, and not as I do" policy. However I do feel that you can lead by example, no matter what your title is. George writes, "It's primarily the leaders actions that inspire people to do more, to be more and to learn more." and again, I want to point out that this can happen at all levels in an organization.

I truly feel that if you want to move ahead in your organization, you need to lead by example, and after reading Georges post this week about Culture as the shadow of the leader, I wanted to reiterate his comments and in particular, take a closer look at what we are doing on a daily basis, and try and determine how that reflects on us and determine how it impacts the folks around us.

Technorati : leadership, management

Intro to Tech Mgr

Just starting to build new blog. Registered techmgr.net and would like to move kmmm.net to techmgr.net.

Minor Changes

I thought I would change the look and feel of the blog so I went with a little more Blue.

Look for more changes in the future.

Keep Smiling

Technorati : Blog

Moving forward

Things have really changed at work as the strategy and pace of our new company is really starting to take hold on a daily basis. Four weeks ago we had a major layoff within the IT ranks, and folks are finally starting to settle down feeling somewhat relieved that we still have jobs and that there is a need for us.

I really feel bad for all of those impacted by the layoff, as I have been in their position and understand what it feels like to get up every morning and not have a job to go to. I was layed off from my last position, and it took me four months and a large cut in pay to find a new position. Good Luck to all of you.

My new boss resides in New York and was on-site this past week. We speak on a daily basis, and have really started to get in sync over the last two weeks. Up to this point, he focused on his infrastructure in another state, and I focused on the infrastructure in my facility. However, it is apparent that we need to start focusing on both infrastructures, and this will be good for both of us.

He asked me to set up one-on-ones with my staff and that worked out very well. At first the staff was skeptical and a little concerned, but it was a very positive experience for the staff. I think they thought it was going to be some test or challenge, and instead it was more of a get to know you - what do you want to do with your career type session. It worked out very well and left my staff feeling comfortable with their future. I heard the same key points over and over again this week:

1) There are no planned layoffs in IT, and we are safe as long as we do our job.
2) Now we have two Data Centers to support, and not just one.
3) Let's move forward

My outlook is changing and becoming much more positive but, time will tell if they really walk the talk.

I think they will.

Technorati : Management, Management; communications, Manager

Best Damn Tech Show

Another good show from the Best Damn Tech Crew

Check it out ....

Click To Play

YouTube shares the wealth, Adobe heads to the web with Photoshop at the lead, Irus on the Virus, the Doctor is In, AllFreeCalls.net is no more, Joost and JumpTV are together forever, RIAA come up with more schemes...

Technorati : Technology, podcasts