“Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past” -unspecified “wise men” quoted by Niccolò Machiavelli With so many articles out there telling me how SDN will change the…
Looking Backward to Look Forward
How to Explain Virtualization to Newbies
In the world of enterprise architecture, many parts of our daily conversations are taken for granted. We talk about virtualization, vMotion®, Storage vMotion, Replication, IOPS, and so very many other…
What If You Can’t Trace End-to-End?
A lot of monitoring systems have a goal of end-to-end tracing, from “click to disk” or something similar. This is usually implemented by adding some kind of tracing information to…
Monitoring: How and Why We Do It
Monitoring is a lot of work. A monitoring system is a service unto itself, and like other applications it needs care, feeding, configuration, databases, DBAs, patching, and maintenance. Though it often prevents the loss of revenue, it doesn’t generate revenue except in rare circumstances. Last, it requires vigilance and attention to detail that is often overlooked or impossible in a busy IT environment. So why even bother?
Queueing Theory: Faster Trains Might Make London Underground Slower
Let’s take a look at a great real-world example that effectively illustrates how queuing theory can be unintuitive even in situations that seem simple. A recent BBC report reveals researchers’…
The Premise of Premises: All Clouds Are Not Created Equal
There’s a common misconception in the IT industry. This misconception stems from the premise that the premises of your infrastructure will either be more expensive or less expensive based on its location. Okay, that may sound like a lot of metaphorical jibber jabber and mixed-speak, but that’s how the industry talks when backed into a corner.
A Look into the Pi-Shaped Expert Model
So you’ve started planning your career using a VCDX skillset. Continuing on that same train of thought, I want to walk you through an additional concept that might help you…
Mastering the Sort Buffer and sort_buffer_size
The sort buffer, which is controlled by the sort_buffer_size setting, is probably one of the most-discussed MySQL settings. Interestingly, in many cases it has a lot less potential to help…
Are You Getting Full Benefit of your IT Monitoring Tools?
I think we’ve all had that moment at 3:00 a.m. over the weekend when we wish our monitoring and management systems would just shut up. The UPS in rack 4’s…
Troubleshooting SQL Server, Part 1 : Do You Use These Shortcuts?
In the popular white paper entitled Troubleshooting SQL Server Wait Statistics, I take you through three scenarios in which a wait stats-only approach is insufficient or even harmful to detecting, diagnosing,…