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…
The Complexity Conundrum
Log Analysis Tools Review: Syslog, Filtering the Most Relevant Events
Who’s passed more than a weekend going almost blind because something in your didn’t work as it should, and it produced, hopefully, thousands of lines of error messages, almost all…
Bringing Ease of Use and Security to Remote Users
The image of a modern office has been rapidly changing in recent years. From the medical field, to sales, to technical support, users are on the road and working from…
Managing the Madness: BYOD Network Devices
When it comes to technology, device management resources have come a long way, just as much as the technology in our actual devices has. As a network or systems admin,…
Six Ways to Protect your Database Backups
I often see forum posts from accidental administrators who want to know how to recover data without a backup. The short answer is, “Now is a good time to work…
Syslog – The Blue-collar Worker of the Data Center
Striking a balance between good visibility into infrastructure events and too much noise is difficult. I’ve worked in plenty of enterprise environments where multiple tools are deployed (often covering the…
Federal IT Management 10 Years from Now: New Skills Required
Here is an interesting article from my colleague Joe Kim, in which he discusses what we can expect to see in the future as federal IT professionals. Over the…
SNMP – It’s Not a Trap!
The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) has been a key part of managing network devices in the data center for some time. It really is a pretty simple protocol to…
Software Updates in the IT Stack: (Not) a Game of Jenga
In my last post, I talked about upgrading storage systems. More specifically, how to determine the right upgrade interval for your storage systems. What the previous post did not cover…
A New Approach to Cloud-Native Applications and How They Could and Should Replace the Legacy Ones
“In the beginning was the word” … oops, “the cloud.” Long ago “cloud” was a buzzword, especially when it was a cool word that one knew exactly what it meant.…