Not the management of hand-held systems, although that sounds like a good topic too (future post!), but more so management of your systems from hand-held computing devices.
Being the iPad advocate that I am, I'm going to focus this posting on the iOS platform.
Have I mentioned how much it annoys me (network engineer by trade) that Apple used iOS? Sigh.
So you're a network admin, you have an iOS device, and an IP network of servers, network gear, printers, and other appliances to manage. "Easy, pretty much everything has a web interface, I'll just browse to it, create a shortcut on my iPad, and BAM, I'm done."
I won't argue that is one way to do it, but I won't agree it's the best.
To start with, what is your management platform? Are you a shop running HP SiteScope management software? You're in luck - download the free SiteScope app for your iPad or iPhone. It's an iPhone app, so it'll work on the iPad, but doesn't take advantage of the bigger real estate afforded by the iPad (yet?). So there's your portable network/sys admin view into the current status of your systems.
Not a SiteScope user? Hmm, well there's other options...
Most ESMs (Enterprise Service Management Applications) have a web interface, you can shortcut that to the tablet; but likely the scale/layout will be designed for a PC screen, not a tablet so you will have to (if allowed that flexibility) create a custom dashboard for tablets.
So there's your high-level view into things, but when you really want to roll up your sleeves, here's some iPad apps I use and find practical:
IP Calculator - simple intuitive interface. Not for IPv6, but that's not a big problem for me (yet...)
VTrace - handy for troubleshooting routing situations in wide-area networks.
WinAdmin - RDP client to access those pesky Windows servers. Solid and reliable, easy to use. Even easier if you get a Bluetooth keyboard for your iPad.
MyRouters Pro - console management of multiple Cisco devices (you know, the real IOS?).
gUnit - being Canadian, I frequently have to make metric/imperial conversions; this tool is excellent at that.
Dropbox - my number one way to move files between my laptop & iPad.
Note Taker HD - have to take quick hand-written notes in a technical meeting, or sketch up network diagrams on the fly? This tool works fantastically for me (best with a stylus though).
I'm using all these apps on iOS 4.2.1 using the original iPad hardware.
Taking the "blah" out of blogging on IT Project, Service, and Operations management topics.
Showing posts with label Enterprise Systems Management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Enterprise Systems Management. Show all posts
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Current Networking Trends that Affect Network Management
Trends in Network Management are understandably driven by the trends in network architecture. Network architecture tends to be viewed as monolithic and unchanging; this is far from the truth. Networks tend to go through cyclical evolutions approximately every five years when the ever-increasing plethora of other network dependent technologies build up a critical mass and force change on the network. Like every other technology the IT manager must face, these changes must be adapted to and managed effectively because of the pressure they place on the networks that keep Information Technology’s life-blood flowing.
Convergence
Voice over IP (VoIP) has been in the workplace for some time now and most networks have already adopted, or planned for, this technology. Those which have not will need to in short order – if your shop won’t ever use VoIP as it exists today, other convergence requirements will be around the corner. Even if your shop is not using a VoIP technology today, it is foreseeable that the other business areas or the telco providers will provide sufficient momentum or incentive for this change to take place.
Support of VoIP solutions can include the requirement for Power Over Ethernet (POE), Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs), and traffic prioritization. These technologies have in the recent past outstripped the ability of legacy NMS’ to properly monitor and manage them.
Network-based video conferencing and streaming audio for training and other business (and often non-business) related requirements may not require POE but demand traffic prioritization and VLAN capability on the network. Finding a corporate network solution in place today that does not support either VLAN or traffic prioritization is rare, but what about the NMS that monitors and reports upon these technologies?
The other factor to consider with respect to convergence and it’s impact on NMS choices is that convergence based technologies entering the workplace tend to be very high-profile in as far as the public image and business operation of the workplace are concerned. When the telephones don’t work, or the customer WebEx sessions fail to operate smoothly, customer perception of the organization is negatively impacted.
A NMS choice needs to be designed to support convergence technologies, or be a supported integration with a point solution from the convergence technology vendor (i.e.; have a proven “plug-in” capability with your Cisco IP telephony management toolset).
Mobility
An increasing demand is placed on today’s networks to support mobile computing solutions from laptops and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) to wireless VoIP devices. This is by no means an inclusive list, but clearly the expanded use of these types of end-user computing technologies is driving the increase in deployment of wireless networking technologies.
As more wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are deployed, a trend is occurring where many shops are looking seriously at the continued value in having multiple physical Ethernet drops for every person’s work area.
The increased dependence on WLANs for business critical functions is a change in networks that is driven in from the network edge, as opposed to outwards from the network core. Having the end-users bring more of these technologies into the workplace with the expectation that they will have access to the same business functionality that they have had from their hard-wired desktop systems is driving this requirement at a nearly exponential growth rate.
Deployment of wireless network technologies to keep pace with the demand can be a risky business, and your selection of NMS needs to be able to keep pace with these demands. If your organization is seeing the growth in wireless technologies ensure that you select an NMS that will have the scalability to add monitoring for the quantity of Wireless Access Points (WAPs) that will be deployed. This can be a significant additional number of “managed nodes.” You will also need to make some strategic decisions as to whether you will be monitoring the wireless devices attaching to the WAPs.
A further consideration when selecting a NMS for a wireless environment is the support for the control and management infrastructure used between the WAPs and the wired network. Often large wireless deployments will have centralized controllers that manage groups of WAPs. These architectures will also likely need enhanced ability to monitor security related aspects.
Security
A trend in networking is the ability to apply security controls at the network edge. This useful concept requires underpinning technology that needs to tie back into your NMS for control and audit purposes. Access to network ports is managed by intelligent edge switches that leverage RADIUS technology and tie it back into the directory systems; thus controlling who is authorized to connect physically or wirelessly to the network.
However you implement this, your NMS of choice needs to be aware of “bad connections” and forward those alarms to your network and/or security people. Perhaps there’s even automated controls you want to leverage for this, but regardless, you’ll need an NMS that is ready to work alongside these identity-driven networks.
When senior management (or worse, external auditors) come knocking asking for reports of network use how will you provide that information? Find out what kinds of audit/reporting requirements your organization may require of the network for privacy or other mandated legal compliance reasons, and use those as further criteria in your NMS selection.
The basic underpinning network management technology in use today is the Simple Network Management Protocol, or SNMP. SNMP versions 1 and 2c (the most frequently used versions) are infamously insecure. These protocols should never be used outside of the secure perimeter of your network, and even regarded dubiously for use inside. Most network gear you buy today support the use of SNMPv3, the secure encrypted version of SNMP. The challenge comes when evaluating the NMS, as many still do not support SNMPv3 out of the box. This is certainly something to check for.
If a part of your network is outsourced, and you still want or need to manage it, you will need to have an NMS that is capable of understanding proxy-based SNMP management, likely as well as SNMPv3. Many network outsourcing companies will not provide this proxied monitoring so you should be checking with your service provider before making this a NMS criterion.
Configuration
How is your organization dealing with issues of network device inventory, version control, and change management? Should your NMS be part of the solution or part of the problem?
Your NMS choice does not necessarily have to be part of a framework solution with a full Configuration Management Database (CMDB), but it should at least have significantly advanced polling and collection abilities to keep current on what is out in your network. As well, this data should at the very least be readily exportable to your CMDB choice of today or tomorrow. The polling intervals should be readily configurable, so that you can have different polling intervals for network nodes of different importance.
When considering polling, you should also learn about the polling technology that the NMS uses. Is it basic ICMP (ping) status for up-down? Or is it slightly more complex SNMP-based? As discussed in the security section, consider the versions of SNMP to be used. Additionally, try to understand what kind of polling engine the NMS uses and how it differentiates and adds/removes risk from the management of your network. This is the kind of area where an expert consultant in NMS comes in very handy.
Is it important to you to centrally manage the firmware and configuration of your network topology? There are many point-solution tools from the hardware vendors that provide this, as well as third-party application specifically designed for this functionality. You should determine whether your need are better suited by integrating this functionality into your NMS, or obtaining a NMS that provides this ability. Wanting your NMS to handle your complete configuration management needs will dramatically shorten the list of available products, so it is advised to focus more on the compatibility aspect and leverage the point solution for firmware and configuration management, while letting the NMS manage discovery & status.
Business Driven Requirements
Every decision made in IT is governed by or directly affected by business drivers and requirements. Various requirements for your NMS selection are going to be driven from what is currently happening with other business areas of your organization, or strategic initiatives.
We spoke early in the security discussion about regulatory compliance issues around having data collected and reported for audit, but other areas of consideration should be around mergers or acquisitions, planned growth, or outsourcing. All of these factors require a NMS that is scalable and quick to update its understanding of your changing network topology. It may also require that you have the ability to provide secured, limited access to the NMS for third-parties who have shared interests in the support and maintenance of the network.
Does the organization have any plans around Data Centre consolidation? This kind of activity will mean reduced core network nodes, but increased edge nodes, and an increased backhaul of network traffic. This again leads to scalability of the solution, speed and accuracy of the discovery and polling mechanisms, and the ability to extract the network inventory information readily.
Green IT initiatives may have some impact on your NMS selection as well. While power reduction strategies likely point towards data centre consolidation, they can have other unexpected outcomes for the network, like increased virtualization, possibly outsourcing of certain services, and often less printing means more electronic data movement and the ability to get large files quickly back and forth from the core to the edge on mobile devices.
Ensure that your NMS selection takes these kinds of items into consideration by its ability to provide management to the network edge (or beyond) with speed and accuracy, and a fast and accurate causal engine to help reduce the time spent diagnosing problems that affect the delivery of data to the other business users. They may not always be network problems, but can you back that up objectively and quickly when the VP is standing in your door?
Another area to consider is managing the network as a delivered service to your customers and the data collection, analysis, and reporting requirements for that. Service Delivery Management in the NMS is also rare but tends to be a feature available more commonly when you are using framework solutions. You can get to this point without a framework if you carefully consider how you will make the measurements of the Service Level Agreements and Service Level Objectives available to the customers of your network, both internal and external to the organization.
Lastly, the biggest impact that business driven requirements have on NMS selection is that of diminishing budgets and the requirement of doing more, or the same, with less. This can lead you to consider how to budget for your NMS & its ongoing support and maintenance, but also gives you the opportunity to consider making it an operational cost by leveraging some form of “Software as a Service.” Many vendors provide this solution, where for monthly or annual fees they will manage your NMS and provide the output you require from it by either hosting the NMS remotely (debatable due to security considerations) or implementing and maintaining the NMS on your site.
Convergence
Voice over IP (VoIP) has been in the workplace for some time now and most networks have already adopted, or planned for, this technology. Those which have not will need to in short order – if your shop won’t ever use VoIP as it exists today, other convergence requirements will be around the corner. Even if your shop is not using a VoIP technology today, it is foreseeable that the other business areas or the telco providers will provide sufficient momentum or incentive for this change to take place.
Support of VoIP solutions can include the requirement for Power Over Ethernet (POE), Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs), and traffic prioritization. These technologies have in the recent past outstripped the ability of legacy NMS’ to properly monitor and manage them.
Network-based video conferencing and streaming audio for training and other business (and often non-business) related requirements may not require POE but demand traffic prioritization and VLAN capability on the network. Finding a corporate network solution in place today that does not support either VLAN or traffic prioritization is rare, but what about the NMS that monitors and reports upon these technologies?
The other factor to consider with respect to convergence and it’s impact on NMS choices is that convergence based technologies entering the workplace tend to be very high-profile in as far as the public image and business operation of the workplace are concerned. When the telephones don’t work, or the customer WebEx sessions fail to operate smoothly, customer perception of the organization is negatively impacted.
A NMS choice needs to be designed to support convergence technologies, or be a supported integration with a point solution from the convergence technology vendor (i.e.; have a proven “plug-in” capability with your Cisco IP telephony management toolset).
Mobility
An increasing demand is placed on today’s networks to support mobile computing solutions from laptops and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) to wireless VoIP devices. This is by no means an inclusive list, but clearly the expanded use of these types of end-user computing technologies is driving the increase in deployment of wireless networking technologies.
As more wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) are deployed, a trend is occurring where many shops are looking seriously at the continued value in having multiple physical Ethernet drops for every person’s work area.
The increased dependence on WLANs for business critical functions is a change in networks that is driven in from the network edge, as opposed to outwards from the network core. Having the end-users bring more of these technologies into the workplace with the expectation that they will have access to the same business functionality that they have had from their hard-wired desktop systems is driving this requirement at a nearly exponential growth rate.
Deployment of wireless network technologies to keep pace with the demand can be a risky business, and your selection of NMS needs to be able to keep pace with these demands. If your organization is seeing the growth in wireless technologies ensure that you select an NMS that will have the scalability to add monitoring for the quantity of Wireless Access Points (WAPs) that will be deployed. This can be a significant additional number of “managed nodes.” You will also need to make some strategic decisions as to whether you will be monitoring the wireless devices attaching to the WAPs.
A further consideration when selecting a NMS for a wireless environment is the support for the control and management infrastructure used between the WAPs and the wired network. Often large wireless deployments will have centralized controllers that manage groups of WAPs. These architectures will also likely need enhanced ability to monitor security related aspects.
Security
A trend in networking is the ability to apply security controls at the network edge. This useful concept requires underpinning technology that needs to tie back into your NMS for control and audit purposes. Access to network ports is managed by intelligent edge switches that leverage RADIUS technology and tie it back into the directory systems; thus controlling who is authorized to connect physically or wirelessly to the network.
However you implement this, your NMS of choice needs to be aware of “bad connections” and forward those alarms to your network and/or security people. Perhaps there’s even automated controls you want to leverage for this, but regardless, you’ll need an NMS that is ready to work alongside these identity-driven networks.
When senior management (or worse, external auditors) come knocking asking for reports of network use how will you provide that information? Find out what kinds of audit/reporting requirements your organization may require of the network for privacy or other mandated legal compliance reasons, and use those as further criteria in your NMS selection.
The basic underpinning network management technology in use today is the Simple Network Management Protocol, or SNMP. SNMP versions 1 and 2c (the most frequently used versions) are infamously insecure. These protocols should never be used outside of the secure perimeter of your network, and even regarded dubiously for use inside. Most network gear you buy today support the use of SNMPv3, the secure encrypted version of SNMP. The challenge comes when evaluating the NMS, as many still do not support SNMPv3 out of the box. This is certainly something to check for.
If a part of your network is outsourced, and you still want or need to manage it, you will need to have an NMS that is capable of understanding proxy-based SNMP management, likely as well as SNMPv3. Many network outsourcing companies will not provide this proxied monitoring so you should be checking with your service provider before making this a NMS criterion.
Configuration
How is your organization dealing with issues of network device inventory, version control, and change management? Should your NMS be part of the solution or part of the problem?
Your NMS choice does not necessarily have to be part of a framework solution with a full Configuration Management Database (CMDB), but it should at least have significantly advanced polling and collection abilities to keep current on what is out in your network. As well, this data should at the very least be readily exportable to your CMDB choice of today or tomorrow. The polling intervals should be readily configurable, so that you can have different polling intervals for network nodes of different importance.
When considering polling, you should also learn about the polling technology that the NMS uses. Is it basic ICMP (ping) status for up-down? Or is it slightly more complex SNMP-based? As discussed in the security section, consider the versions of SNMP to be used. Additionally, try to understand what kind of polling engine the NMS uses and how it differentiates and adds/removes risk from the management of your network. This is the kind of area where an expert consultant in NMS comes in very handy.
Is it important to you to centrally manage the firmware and configuration of your network topology? There are many point-solution tools from the hardware vendors that provide this, as well as third-party application specifically designed for this functionality. You should determine whether your need are better suited by integrating this functionality into your NMS, or obtaining a NMS that provides this ability. Wanting your NMS to handle your complete configuration management needs will dramatically shorten the list of available products, so it is advised to focus more on the compatibility aspect and leverage the point solution for firmware and configuration management, while letting the NMS manage discovery & status.
Business Driven Requirements
Every decision made in IT is governed by or directly affected by business drivers and requirements. Various requirements for your NMS selection are going to be driven from what is currently happening with other business areas of your organization, or strategic initiatives.
We spoke early in the security discussion about regulatory compliance issues around having data collected and reported for audit, but other areas of consideration should be around mergers or acquisitions, planned growth, or outsourcing. All of these factors require a NMS that is scalable and quick to update its understanding of your changing network topology. It may also require that you have the ability to provide secured, limited access to the NMS for third-parties who have shared interests in the support and maintenance of the network.
Does the organization have any plans around Data Centre consolidation? This kind of activity will mean reduced core network nodes, but increased edge nodes, and an increased backhaul of network traffic. This again leads to scalability of the solution, speed and accuracy of the discovery and polling mechanisms, and the ability to extract the network inventory information readily.
Green IT initiatives may have some impact on your NMS selection as well. While power reduction strategies likely point towards data centre consolidation, they can have other unexpected outcomes for the network, like increased virtualization, possibly outsourcing of certain services, and often less printing means more electronic data movement and the ability to get large files quickly back and forth from the core to the edge on mobile devices.
Ensure that your NMS selection takes these kinds of items into consideration by its ability to provide management to the network edge (or beyond) with speed and accuracy, and a fast and accurate causal engine to help reduce the time spent diagnosing problems that affect the delivery of data to the other business users. They may not always be network problems, but can you back that up objectively and quickly when the VP is standing in your door?
Another area to consider is managing the network as a delivered service to your customers and the data collection, analysis, and reporting requirements for that. Service Delivery Management in the NMS is also rare but tends to be a feature available more commonly when you are using framework solutions. You can get to this point without a framework if you carefully consider how you will make the measurements of the Service Level Agreements and Service Level Objectives available to the customers of your network, both internal and external to the organization.
Lastly, the biggest impact that business driven requirements have on NMS selection is that of diminishing budgets and the requirement of doing more, or the same, with less. This can lead you to consider how to budget for your NMS & its ongoing support and maintenance, but also gives you the opportunity to consider making it an operational cost by leveraging some form of “Software as a Service.” Many vendors provide this solution, where for monthly or annual fees they will manage your NMS and provide the output you require from it by either hosting the NMS remotely (debatable due to security considerations) or implementing and maintaining the NMS on your site.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
HPSU 2009 - Part 2
I helped set up the Vivit booth with other local chapter leaders and the board of directors, grabbed a really quick (but heavy!) breakfast, then squeezed into the mainstage room for the keynote presentations.
They kicked things off with some brilliant animated clips outlining the current challenges faced by IT - including IT business alignment, the current "new" economy, virtualisation, and cloud computing amongst other things.
Jake Johanssen was our host for the morning. A stand-up comedian which is a really different take but made things much more entertaining than they've been before at 08:00 on a Tuesday morning. The typical jabs at Canadians were made, but Jake threw in some other topical humour that was quite engaging. He really got the crowd warmed up well. The room was definitely smaller than previous years, but it was filled. We're waiting to hear attendance numbers overall. Some interesting trivia about the impact of the economy is that 27% of conferences in Vegas were cancelled this year.
Andy Isherwood VP & GM of HP Software Services
Andy started off thanking for people to come given the economic restraints - a message that brings home where things are at globally an across the US. His discourse started with a focus on budgets being cut between 0 - 40%, and a lot of uncertainty in HP's customers. Andy asked the audience to consider the situation as an opportunity to be innovative. The HP opinion is to try and get ahead of the economic recovery curve by aligning with business, reducing costs, consolidation, and increased efficiency.
Three examples were provided of 3 organisations that have achieved a quick ROI:
- JetBlue
- Altec
- T-Mobile (US-Washington)
These three are the winners of the HP Software Solutions 2009 awards of excellence
It's always nice to hear that organisations have done wonderful things, but the key question is always "So where do you start?"
HP's keynote answer to this was:
- Operational focus to provide a transformational focus over time.
- Cost optimisation to move capital to fund innovation initiatives
- Focus on execution of automation, financial management, virtualisation, and consolidation.
Andy followed up with the HP message that they are about solutions, not products. The delivery options they are flogging are in-house, EDS, Cloud Services SaaS, and HP Partners (oh yeah, them.) I'm still waiting to hear something positive about the EDS acquisition from a customer perspective - I'll be visiting their booth on the showfloor later today to see what I can learn.
Andy touched on what's new in the IT services offering from HP, which is "Cloud Assure", IT financial management, IT performance analytics, and IT resource optimisation.
The marketing branding from HP has changed this year to a new four words; Optimise (technology portfolio - IT Mgt Software), Leverage (biz info), Elevate (biz performance), and Improve (customer experience).
Andy discussed about HP support, and claimed that customer satisfaction is at an all-time high based on improvements made over the last two years. A big piece apparently was "in-sourcing" aspects of the HP support organisations - interesting. He did claim that he was under no illusions that things were ideal. He also commented that things need improvement with customers getting stuck at L1 when things don't get escalated timely, and at L3 when software changes that need to be made aren't happening fast enough.
The services organisation was discussed and that it has been tightly embedded into HP Software overall and is using optmisations like knowledge management to increase IP. Andy also noted that he feels this is not in conflict with the partner environment, but I think this statement is at odds with what is actually happening (actions speak louder than words) in particular the changes that have been made to partner status making it basically impossible for independent and small consulting organisations to have partner status (and benefits) with HP.
Andy closed by thanking the audience for their trust & confidence in HP, our time invested here at the show, and enforced his message that HP is proud to be a customers partner, ready to listen and act with the customers to see success for everyone.
Betty Smith VP of Process at John Hancock & President Emeritus with Vivit
Betty started with a discussion about the first HP software (Mercury) project around TestDirector to improve defect management on their internal web site and replacing spreadsheets and access databases with a centralised tool. They then migrated TestDirector to other software bases in a 6 week period once the initial pilot project had completed. SOme impressive numbers to be sure.
Betty discussed the complexities of the John Hancock/Manulife Financial organisation and the desire to drive efficency and competitive advantage.
She highlighted three main points of how this is done:
- Establish point solutions that provide value - JH does not support long implementations - any job must be finished between 2-6 months.
- Extend the solution to other areas - cross the silos & work across the organisation
- Create the longer term vision and focus on a match between IT & business goals. This provides JH an end state that is adaptable but stable, and leads to lifecycle management.
Products suites in particular that JH has implemented include Quality Management, Asset Management - (DDM, uCMDB). Betty claimed an increased efficiency for chargebacks from 3 weeks to one day using these new systems & processes. Performance Centre, and Business Availability Centre were also discussed, both of these are based out of centralised teams that work across all silos to support the business units.
Further, the discussion touched on Service Catalogue and Service manager being centralised and underpinned by uCMDB.
PPM started off as point solutions within numerous business units, but information wasn't being shared well. The PPM project consolidated and eliminated various applications to standardise on a single platform. Another key advantage of the project was that it defined centralised PM practices and processes.
Betty's main claim was that she works off of a simple end-state vision which she shared grahically with the audience. It had some interesting approaches illustrated in the diagram.Betty discussed techniques that JH used to increase awareness and support including "show & tell" monthly meetings of internal SIGs cross-organisation, developed user forums in sharepoint, and allow for the solutions to be showcased. JH puts on monthly roadshows for the senior mgt level to validate direction and what si importnat to each of the BUs, allow an oppoortunity to adjust priorities, and these are run with individiaul biz units to really understand what is driving them and what areas they can help them improve in.
Betty discussed the regulatory requirements of a financial organisation and the abilities her successful projects have given to free up resources previously committed to audit compliance work - also this allows JH to demonstrate governance of off-shore vendors by having everyone use a centralised consistent solution. Engagement of governing bodies around risk management & expense management is another example of working across biz units. By engaging them in the use of the tools they contribute to the setting of policies and drive the use of the tools as a standard for the organisation.
Betty cited that process is over 50% of a project implementation; making the point that technology doesn't stand on its own without solid process that's oriented to your biz units & directions.
Betty summarised by emphasing that success is achieved by building incrementally focussing on low hanging fruit and creating an end-state vision.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
The eMail You Wish Never Was
We've all done it at least once. Ideally, you only do it once.
You get caught in a moment when you are "up-to-your-eyeballs" when an email comes into your In-Box that is legitimately urgent to someone else, but just not to you at the moment.
At that instant you have some choices... quickly respond with an email back to effectively say "I'll look at this once I have a moment", flag it for follow-up but just don't reply, or pick up the phone for a brief conversation. The first and third options are both quite viable,and common sense dictates that the second option works well for you but puts you in risk of continually receiving more emails.
The problem with the first or third options in responding will come about in HOW you respond. Remember, you're not getting this email while you're casually reading my blog or sipping a coffee at your desk. Imagine yourself at the single busiest point you've been at in the past three years of work; and in executing some of that work you've needed to use your email... while accessing your email to compose a quick note to clarify some work you are delegating you notice "the message" in question.
Now we've set the scenario, and this is where the challenge comes. On 360 days of the year, this isn't an issue, but on one of those TOP FIVE busiest days you have in a year, either the content, tone, or a past interaction makes this email you receive be the straw that breaks the camels back.
Your thoughts run very quickly along the lines of "does this person have any idea how busy I am right now?" or "why is this issue MY problem right now?" I know mine have!
This is the point where you either quickly type up an email response or pick up the phone.
This is also the point where you can unwittingly make a mistake that can take some time to mend.
The reality is that 95% of the time, the sender of the email does NOT know how busy you are, and the issue was obviously of importance to them, but not urgent enough to warrant them placing a phone call to you. Generally speaking, that should be the first indicator that you do NOT need to reply this instant. But, our human nature and sense of ownership of situations as managers urges us to quickly plunk at the keyboard a hasty reply and click send, then blast off to the other 32 things desperately needing our attention at that moment.
An hour (or not even that long!) later you get the phone call that makes you realise that you wish you'd never clicked "send." In your haste, urgency, and certain level of frustration you've typed something you shouldn't have; something that under any "normal" circumstances you never would have, and now you've opened Pandora's box.
So my long-winded story has gotten us to the point where we have two things to cover: what we do now to deal with the situation and how we learn not to get into the situation again.
The only way to deal with a situation like this is to "eat crow." The reality is that while you have correctly perceived that someone else had no idea of how busy, stressed, harried you were at the moment they had electronically requested something of you that you felt was not your responsibility to have to deal with, you also sent off an email without considering or understanding how busy, stressed, or harried this individual was with what they were dealing with at that moment. It's entirely likely that the problem they were bringing to you "isn't yours" but perhaps they felt they had nowhere else to go, and were looking for help (regardless of how that request may have been phrased).
So now, as a responsible manager, it behooves us to go cap-in-hand to the individual you sent the electronic reply to and hold a brief but frank discussion, starting with a sincere apology for your tone, but focused on understanding their issue, helping them understand what you have on your plate, and coming up with some solution. You may not have their answer, but more than likely, once you understand WHY they were asking you in the first place, you can point them to someone else who does have the answers. And have this conversation face-to-face if at all possible; this kind of thing does not translate well over the phone, and further emails will only risk making things worse due to their intrinsic impersonal nature.
And finally, how do we avoid this kind of situation? As I suggested much earlier, if you are truly over-whelmed do NOT send an email or phone the individual without taking five minutes to think through your answer in the context of the question: "What is happening at this persons desk right now to prompt them to send me this email?" This is a great little trick guaranteed to put you in the right frame of mind to be helpful and avoid unnecessary workplace confrontations and stress.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
HP OM8 for Windows - First Review
While at PEG March '08 I've been attending the Operations Manager Windows 8/SiteScope training. I've had the web-delivered "intro to" session a couple of months ago, but there's nothing like the hands-on with the HP experts there to walk you through and answer questions.
Prior to this week, I knew at a high-level what most of the new features/functions to the Windows version of the product would be. A lot of the functionality that was previously only available with the Unix version has been ported. I also knew about Reporter, the HTTPS agents, and Performance being packaged up together in OMW8.
My initial thoughts after three days of instructor-led hands-on is that there are enough significant improvements here for any OVOW 7.x users to start planning their upgrade. And anyone who is going down the path of trying to find an ESM solution should give this product a fair shake in their evaluations.
Nodes Business Like ESM Business
Having the External Nodes feature available for the Windows platform is great. You can use the standard pattern matching syntax for OM to match messages from nodes not in DNS against "catch-all" groups and this is helpful as many organizations don't seem to have their DNS 100% clean... But besides processing messages, the ability (which has been there previously) to have nodes without agents in the node & service topology is quite handy. HP has put a new wrapper around the node config editor which is useful since the addition of the HTTPS agent type makes node config a little trickier than it used to be. However, you can always jump to "expert mode" and do things the "old" way. Obviously, the inclusion of the HTTPS agents is a huge leap forwards for the Windows management world, but beware - it's not just a single port each way to manage through the firewall. Another really nice touch is the ability to push HTTPS agents to UNIX nodes. This function is technically unsupported, but easy and useful.
Service Please!
Version 8 also brings the CLI access to the configuration of service via the service API.
Config This
For anyone who's rolled up their sleeves and dug into the OVOW registry previously, you'll be glad to hear about the Server Configuration editor in OMW8. Many of the settings and configuration that were largely unknown and only available through registry edits are now contained in this powerful GUI. Config items from auditing to database to agent certificates are accessed through this interface. Another long-awaiting config item is the ability to add AD groups to roles in the User Role Config Editor.
Other useful features include the unplanned/scheduled outages, remote action security, and detailed heart-beat polling config options.
All-in-all, if you're an OVOW shop today, start talking to your consultants about the upgrade (it's going to take some planning!) and if you're not using a tool like this yet, check it out. Pricing is still going to be the major issue for anyone new to this market space, and I'm waiting to hear from HP if they'll be offering an "Express" package like they did for OVOW 7.5x to make it more affordable to the mid-tier market.
Prior to this week, I knew at a high-level what most of the new features/functions to the Windows version of the product would be. A lot of the functionality that was previously only available with the Unix version has been ported. I also knew about Reporter, the HTTPS agents, and Performance being packaged up together in OMW8.
My initial thoughts after three days of instructor-led hands-on is that there are enough significant improvements here for any OVOW 7.x users to start planning their upgrade. And anyone who is going down the path of trying to find an ESM solution should give this product a fair shake in their evaluations.
Nodes Business Like ESM Business
Having the External Nodes feature available for the Windows platform is great. You can use the standard pattern matching syntax for OM to match messages from nodes not in DNS against "catch-all" groups and this is helpful as many organizations don't seem to have their DNS 100% clean... But besides processing messages, the ability (which has been there previously) to have nodes without agents in the node & service topology is quite handy. HP has put a new wrapper around the node config editor which is useful since the addition of the HTTPS agent type makes node config a little trickier than it used to be. However, you can always jump to "expert mode" and do things the "old" way. Obviously, the inclusion of the HTTPS agents is a huge leap forwards for the Windows management world, but beware - it's not just a single port each way to manage through the firewall. Another really nice touch is the ability to push HTTPS agents to UNIX nodes. This function is technically unsupported, but easy and useful.
Service Please!
Version 8 also brings the CLI access to the configuration of service via the service API.
Config This
For anyone who's rolled up their sleeves and dug into the OVOW registry previously, you'll be glad to hear about the Server Configuration editor in OMW8. Many of the settings and configuration that were largely unknown and only available through registry edits are now contained in this powerful GUI. Config items from auditing to database to agent certificates are accessed through this interface. Another long-awaiting config item is the ability to add AD groups to roles in the User Role Config Editor.
Other useful features include the unplanned/scheduled outages, remote action security, and detailed heart-beat polling config options.
All-in-all, if you're an OVOW shop today, start talking to your consultants about the upgrade (it's going to take some planning!) and if you're not using a tool like this yet, check it out. Pricing is still going to be the major issue for anyone new to this market space, and I'm waiting to hear from HP if they'll be offering an "Express" package like they did for OVOW 7.5x to make it more affordable to the mid-tier market.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Managing Your Heterogeneous Environment - Part the First
What is a heterogeneous environment? Well, what it's not is a the place where a really smart straight guy lives. What I'm getting at is really every IT shop. You may say "Hey, we only run Windows" or "Dude, we're purely SUSE here" but stop for a moment and consider those switches, routers, and UPS' in your IT shop. Are they Microsoft? Novell? Yeah, didn't think so.
So what we've established at this time is that we all work in heterogeneous IT environments. And quite likely, certain aspects of them are managed. Probably quite well (I'm not making the assumption that you can't do your job). But what's the big picture? Are you viewing things as storage, servers, networks, applications, et al and each a world unto itself? This is quite likely the situation.
So back tracking again, we've got our IT shop made up of bits and pieces from various vendors, all working together to deliver some sort of service to our end-users. Now we want to manage the whole shooting match. Get all the system stats, performance data, and alarms into one consistent view.
Well, if you go to any of the tier one vendors, they'll tell you this is simple. "Buy our product, some consulting hours, and you're done." You're done alright. You can have the consultants come in and roll out a great solution, that works for the first few weeks. What you really need in place first to underpin this architecture and provide long-term valuable metrics on your heterogeneous IT environment is a baseline, strategy, and process. Tools can come later, and with the toolsets on the market today, can be largely interchangeable & interconnecting. That's not in any way to dismiss the amount of work it takes to set up the tools correctly in the first place, that IS a lot of work.
What I want to stress here is that managing a mixed IT environment; managing all of your systems components; having that BIG picture of IT service delivery needs a good baseline/audit of what's in place today, a top-down strategy going forward, and processes that work with your people & business practises.
So what we've established at this time is that we all work in heterogeneous IT environments. And quite likely, certain aspects of them are managed. Probably quite well (I'm not making the assumption that you can't do your job). But what's the big picture? Are you viewing things as storage, servers, networks, applications, et al and each a world unto itself? This is quite likely the situation.
So back tracking again, we've got our IT shop made up of bits and pieces from various vendors, all working together to deliver some sort of service to our end-users. Now we want to manage the whole shooting match. Get all the system stats, performance data, and alarms into one consistent view.
Well, if you go to any of the tier one vendors, they'll tell you this is simple. "Buy our product, some consulting hours, and you're done." You're done alright. You can have the consultants come in and roll out a great solution, that works for the first few weeks. What you really need in place first to underpin this architecture and provide long-term valuable metrics on your heterogeneous IT environment is a baseline, strategy, and process. Tools can come later, and with the toolsets on the market today, can be largely interchangeable & interconnecting. That's not in any way to dismiss the amount of work it takes to set up the tools correctly in the first place, that IS a lot of work.
What I want to stress here is that managing a mixed IT environment; managing all of your systems components; having that BIG picture of IT service delivery needs a good baseline/audit of what's in place today, a top-down strategy going forward, and processes that work with your people & business practises.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
HP Software Partner Enablement Galaxy
Another week on the road, after spending some "quality" time in New Orleans at HP Software Partner Enablement Galaxy last week I've come away with a few thoughts to share here. It's good to have a little time to reflect on it since I've been on the road most of October and my thoughts were largely focused on just getting back home.
To give a little background, HP Software PEG was a "by invitation" event where just over 100 consultants who are HP Software partners gathered to learn more about the current state of HP Enterprise Systems Management Software, and get some specific skills ramp-up on one of five product sets of which advanced & condensed "boot camp" style training was being offered.
Partners in attendance were from "the Americas" but primarily from the US. I met about 8 other Canadians, and a small handful of folks from Central/South America.
So, now to the meat of my thoughts... After the first day I was worried this was going to be more sales oriented than technical training. The first half of the day was spent with some "rah rah" speeches about selling software and the HP Software roadmap in very general terms in a general session. After the morning's session, we broke into our various classrooms. Personally, I choose to take the Business Availability Centre basic/intermediate level training. Again, the second half of day one ended up being an overview of the various components that make up the HP "BAC" suite, and some fairly high-level information. We each were given an HP laptop to work off of for the week, pre-set with VMWare Player and a couple of VMs. As the week progressed we got way more hands on and the teacher/subject matter became more interesting and challenging. The real challenge, however, was practical hands-on learning.
As it turns out, BAC depends on 3 core servers (Gateway, Data Processing, DB) which can run on two separate servers, but are reasonably resource intensive. The once we got to distributing the probes for various types of data gathering and synthetic transactions, we ran into some serious configuration and performance problems running those on the VMs on the laptops. That really slowed the learning curve.
Also, there were no formal printed course materials for us to take. After complaining about this at the end of day one, we were quickly provided the following morning with hardcopies of the various Power-Point slide decks, but without any accompanying notes other than those we'd take ourselves. So, to walk away from the bootcamp without demo or eval software or course materials has made it a big challenge to try and keep up the learning curve since I've returned to the office. Plus, trying to knowledge share to other folks on my team is also a challenge.
I'm planning on summarizing some high-level info on BAC for a presentation at my local Vivit chapter this Friday, but beyond that it's getting to be a bit of a challenge to leverage the week of heads-down learning into expanded corporate skill sets.
The technical challenges with the laptop based VMs I suggested at the time could be dealt with by having HP actually ship a rack of 1U servers for each classroom, and have the class break into small groups who work together implementing a BAC solution. Add to that some sort of training materials and demo software we can take with us back to our offices and then we've got a great solution.
So, was the week in New Orleans worth my time? This time I'd say yes. But if I go again in Feb where-ever they are planning on hosting the sessions, I'm hoping that they address some of the issues myself and fellow students flagged in the course reviews to ensure that we can have more productivity during and after the classes.
To give a little background, HP Software PEG was a "by invitation" event where just over 100 consultants who are HP Software partners gathered to learn more about the current state of HP Enterprise Systems Management Software, and get some specific skills ramp-up on one of five product sets of which advanced & condensed "boot camp" style training was being offered.
Partners in attendance were from "the Americas" but primarily from the US. I met about 8 other Canadians, and a small handful of folks from Central/South America.
So, now to the meat of my thoughts... After the first day I was worried this was going to be more sales oriented than technical training. The first half of the day was spent with some "rah rah" speeches about selling software and the HP Software roadmap in very general terms in a general session. After the morning's session, we broke into our various classrooms. Personally, I choose to take the Business Availability Centre basic/intermediate level training. Again, the second half of day one ended up being an overview of the various components that make up the HP "BAC" suite, and some fairly high-level information. We each were given an HP laptop to work off of for the week, pre-set with VMWare Player and a couple of VMs. As the week progressed we got way more hands on and the teacher/subject matter became more interesting and challenging. The real challenge, however, was practical hands-on learning.
As it turns out, BAC depends on 3 core servers (Gateway, Data Processing, DB) which can run on two separate servers, but are reasonably resource intensive. The once we got to distributing the probes for various types of data gathering and synthetic transactions, we ran into some serious configuration and performance problems running those on the VMs on the laptops. That really slowed the learning curve.
Also, there were no formal printed course materials for us to take. After complaining about this at the end of day one, we were quickly provided the following morning with hardcopies of the various Power-Point slide decks, but without any accompanying notes other than those we'd take ourselves. So, to walk away from the bootcamp without demo or eval software or course materials has made it a big challenge to try and keep up the learning curve since I've returned to the office. Plus, trying to knowledge share to other folks on my team is also a challenge.
I'm planning on summarizing some high-level info on BAC for a presentation at my local Vivit chapter this Friday, but beyond that it's getting to be a bit of a challenge to leverage the week of heads-down learning into expanded corporate skill sets.
The technical challenges with the laptop based VMs I suggested at the time could be dealt with by having HP actually ship a rack of 1U servers for each classroom, and have the class break into small groups who work together implementing a BAC solution. Add to that some sort of training materials and demo software we can take with us back to our offices and then we've got a great solution.
So, was the week in New Orleans worth my time? This time I'd say yes. But if I go again in Feb where-ever they are planning on hosting the sessions, I'm hoping that they address some of the issues myself and fellow students flagged in the course reviews to ensure that we can have more productivity during and after the classes.
Friday, October 26, 2007
New Software from HP, New Orleans from Jason
I won't even try and affect a cajun accent for this post, but here I am on my last day in New Orleans, at the HP Partner Galaxy event. I just spent five days heads down and in high-gear learning mode absorbing everything I can about the new release of HP's Business Availability Centre and learning about the other new product releases out this month.
I'm pretty well rounded on HP's previous offering in this area, OVIS (OpenView Internet Services) but now that all changes up with the Mercury acquisition of last year. Now they've got a really interesting package to handle complete business end-user experience monitoring and management.
The toolset is complex to get your head around initially, but the good news is that it comes in components and you only need to buy & install what you need. What you will need though, if you don't have someone on staff to handle ESM applications, is consulting time to get this done right the first time.
I'll post again soon with more details and opinions, right now I've got to catch my flights back to LAX, and then Vancouver!
Happy ESMing everyone, and so long to New Orleans.
I'm pretty well rounded on HP's previous offering in this area, OVIS (OpenView Internet Services) but now that all changes up with the Mercury acquisition of last year. Now they've got a really interesting package to handle complete business end-user experience monitoring and management.
The toolset is complex to get your head around initially, but the good news is that it comes in components and you only need to buy & install what you need. What you will need though, if you don't have someone on staff to handle ESM applications, is consulting time to get this done right the first time.
I'll post again soon with more details and opinions, right now I've got to catch my flights back to LAX, and then Vancouver!
Happy ESMing everyone, and so long to New Orleans.
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