My Kind of March Madness

I’m not much for basketball but I laughed when my friends at Solarwinds emailed me about their version of March Madness. They’ve got a Sci-Fi Bracket going on which is totally my style.

For the people that have voted already, I do believe you’re smoking crack in at least five instances:

CMDBs Suck: Keeping Track of Servers, Applications, Addresses

My third post over at thwack, the Solarwinds forums, is up, asking how you keep track of servers, applications, IP addresses, warranties, etc. It could also be titled as “CMDBs Suck.” This is one area that everybody does differently, and there’s some good stuff going on. There’s also some ridiculous stuff going on. I think people put too much information into their CMDBs, particularly information that the CMDB cannot be authoritative for, so it gets out of sync. On the other hand, CMDBs often don’t have complete information about applications, so a sysadmin gets called for everything when it should really be the app guy. I want to hear about it, and I thought it’d be a good way to …

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Is it possible to have too much monitoring?

In the category of shameless self-promotion[0] I’m one of the SolarWinds thwack Ambassadors for the month of March, and I’ve posted my first discussion topic, asking whether it’s possible to ever have too much monitoring. If you’re not familiar with thwack it’s the SolarWinds community site, it’s great. I’ve been in orbit around SolarWinds since Networking Tech Field Day #1, and I’m happy to take a few topics that are more discussion-oriented and post them over there. SolarWinds also has a whole bunch of free tools there, like a Wake-On-LAN tool I’ve used to wake my VMware ESXi hosts up from standby, a VM-to-Cloud calculator to let you see how expensive it would be to take all your VMs and …

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