No matter how much automation, redundancy, and protection you build into your systems, thing are always going to break. It might be a change breaking an API to another system.…
After It Broke: Executing Good Postmortems
Five Must-dos of Database Performance Management
Here is an interesting article from my colleague Joe Kim, in which he explores database performance management. Databases are complex, multifaceted, and vital to the health of every agency. They…
When is a Storage System Full?
When designing the underlying storage infrastructure for a set of applications, several metrics are important. First, there’s capacity. How much storage do you need? This is a metric that’s well…
Choosing What to Monitor – Understanding Key Metrics
Monitoring has always been a loosely defined and somewhat controversial term in IT organizations. IT professionals have very strong opinions about the tools they use, because monitoring performance metrics and…
AI Should Not Replace Established Security Practices
Here is an interesting article from my colleague Joe Kim, in which he discusses the impact of artificial intelligence on cybersecurity.
Customizing Logwatch for Sysadmin Needs
Logwatch is essentially a system log analyzer and reporter. It elaborates logs that are simply collected by syslog. This kind of evolution is simplifying the daily job of modern system…
The Complexity Conundrum
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…
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,…