coconutBattery — This little app tells you more info about your battery’s quality of life. Namely, I’ve been having a frustrating problem — my laptop acts like it’s at 0% and shuts down, even when the power meter reads upwards of 10-30%… According to coconutBattery, my battery’s only operating about 80% of its original capacity. Maybe that’s my problem… It also allows you to save its stats so you can monitor your battery over time.

coconutWifi — Many Mac controls are easier to use than Windows — but the Airport card isn’t always one of them. Unlike on a Windows machine, it doesn’t tell you which networks in the area are encrypted. This little app changes that with a handy icon telling you how many open networks are available, and not only that — it also lets you know what channels they’re all using. Now I can easily increase the range of my network by setting it to an unused channel.

Excuse me, I have to go play with my new utility toys…

ScienceLogic: Mike, what’s your background working with network and management system tools?

Mike Lawson: Before joining Apptis, I worked for the Air Force, mainly in satellite communications for almost nine years. I’m probably most familiar with HP OpenView and BMC Remedy. I managed a team that used them but wasn’t involved in tool selection; like many other federal IT workers, we didn’t have a choice of tools because there were existing enterprise licenses and maintenance contracts.

I also saw a large systems integrator do a full Remedy/Crystal Systems/OpenView installation. It took 6 weeks to stand up and customize to meet just the basic monitoring requirements, and it cost something like half a million dollars. At the time, I thought that wasn’t bad and was a pretty typical experience.

ScienceLogic: Coming from where you did, what’s your take on EM7?

Mike Lawson: Honestly, I didn’t believe that EM7 could really do all that it claimed. In many ways, it was the complete opposite of what I had seen first-hand with other monitoring solutions. Could it really cover that much functionality? At relatively much lower cost to the customer and without the licensing nightmare?

That quickly changed when I needed to understand the system enough to run it at a customer’s site. I went back over the training docs I received during my initial training class and jumped in; now, 6 months later, I’m the EM7 expert and can tell you that it delivers on all those promises. (But I still need to show people to get them to believe it too)

I preach the “EM7 gospel” and when anyone wants to talk monitoring, I ask about the universal pain points: cost, maintenance contracts and licensing, and then I explain EM7. The cost difference is real; the solution is based on capacity, so there’s no licensing and it’s easy to use. They are shocked to learn that they can buy multiple EM7 appliances and years of maintenance for what they paid for most other tools.

ScienceLogic: Apptis won the contract for monitoring aboard the USNS Mercy. We love that you’re using EM7 for one of the Navy’s hospital ships. Can you tell us more?

Mike Lawson: The USNS Mercy is a Military Sealift Command hospital ship. Some stats:

• 849 feet long (nearly the size of a football field)
• 12 fully-equipped operating rooms, a 1,000 bed hospital facility, digital radiological services, a diagnostic and clinical laboratory, a pharmacy, an optometry lab, a CAT scan and two oxygen producing plants
• Crew: 61 civilian mariners, 956 Naval medical staff, and 259 Naval support staff

The USNS recently departed on a five-month humanitarian mission in the Western Pacific and Southeast Asia in support of Pacific Partnership 2008. The partnership provides international medical, dental and engineering teams this summer to provide humanitarian support and conduct joint, combined, and cooperative Civil-Military Operations in order to improve regional stability and build partner capacity to respond to natural disasters and pandemic.

For the most part, the ship’s network is self-contained, but can also use a landline when docked. The network covers 400 devices, including Windows/Exchange servers and VMware for server virtualization. Prior to using EM7, none of the monitoring was integrated; each system was independently monitored through individual vendor-specific consoles.

Out of the box, EM7 provided integrated systems, application and network management for all network gear, applications and virtual machines in one solution. We didn’t have to do a lot of customization – EM7 includes best-practice based thresholds, event and monitoring templates and this covered what USNS Mercy needed to monitor.

ScienceLogic: You’re a systems integrator with a very useful “customer point of view” when it comes to looking at tools. From that perspective, can you share what you think are the biggest benefits that EM7 provides?

Mike Lawson: First of all, EM7 stands up right away. We’re talking days, not weeks. In contrast to the lengthy installation of OpenView and Remedy I witnessed during my military career, I was able to configure, customize, and implement the EM7 solution for the USNS Mercy in three days.

Second, it’s easy to train people on and the support is outstanding. This judgment is from first-hand experience. Right before the USNS Mercy departed on its latest voyage, the system administrator I had trained on EM7 left, so I had all of a day to train some new EM7 admins. I prepared a seven-page “cheat sheet” and over a 3-hour conference call, we walked through the entire EM7 solution; I haven’t gotten a support call since.

And when a problem did crop up with a device being discovered incorrectly, ScienceLogic was very responsive. We contacted ScienceLogic support on a Saturday and they created and emailed us a video to help troubleshoot the same day. Within 30 seconds of watching the video, the problem was resolved.

Finally, EM7 helps us be good stewards of the government’s money. This is very important to me personally and to Apptis as a company. Because EM7 is cheaper and deploys so quickly and easily, you might think that it’s just the opposite of what a system integrator would want to use. But that’s short-term thinking. We believe in deliver the most value for customers every time. It’s what creates trust and long-term relationships with our customers. Instead of that half million spent on standing up the solution and basic setup, I’d much rather (and I know the customer would rather) spend that on fine-tuning or extending the solution to do much, much more.

As a former government employee, I know what it’s like to use a tool that doesn’t fit my needs. EM7 proves that the best solution can totally break the old model of costly, lengthy installations. EM7 has the right model: the right solution and the right price delivered as an appliance that is easy to deploy, train on and use.

ShareThis

Image via Wikipedia

When I find a new product or service that I think is good I am only too happy to let the world know it on my blog. For the past almost 2 years in the notes of every episode of our podcast, I mention and thank ClickCaster for hosting our podcast.

I originally was turned on to ClickCaster by Scott Converse out in Boulder, Co who was the founder of ClickCaster.  When Scott realized that a free model was not going to pay the bills, he instituted a pay model for podcast hosting. I was only too happy to pay for the great service and stats I was receiving. Well a few months ago Scott and team sold ClickCaster to focus on their new project, Medioh!.

The new owners, nexplore promised no changes and same great service.  Since then the stats stopped working, it became harder and harder to post new content and the site was down more than it was up.  Finally after getting no satisfaction from ClickCaster I had no choice but to look for another host.  Mitchell and I have chosen Pod-o-matic to host the podcast going forward.

Of course we don't have all of the episodes moved over yet because ClickCaster isn't even up enough for us to grab all the episodes.  But most of them are up at pod-o-matic and we have already repointed the feedburner/iTunes feed.  So from here on you can hear us at pod-o-matic. 

If you are looking to host your podcast, you don't have to use pod-o-matic, but don't use ClickCaster!

Image via Wikipedia

When I find a new product or service that I think is good I am only too happy to let the world know it on my blog. For the past almost 2 years in the notes of every episode of our podcast, I mention and thank ClickCaster for hosting our podcast.

I originally was turned on to ClickCaster by Scott Converse out in Boulder, Co who was the founder of ClickCaster.  When Scott realized that a free model was not going to pay the bills, he instituted a pay model for podcast hosting. I was only too happy to pay for the great service and stats I was receiving. Well a few months ago Scott and team sold ClickCaster to focus on their new project, Medioh!.

The new owners, nexplore promised no changes and same great service.  Since then the stats stopped working, it became harder and harder to post new content and the site was down more than it was up.  Finally after getting no satisfaction from ClickCaster I had no choice but to look for another host.  Mitchell and I have chosen Pod-o-matic to host the podcast going forward.

Of course we don't have all of the episodes moved over yet because ClickCaster isn't even up enough for us to grab all the episodes.  But most of them are up at pod-o-matic and we have already repointed the feedburner/iTunes feed.  So from here on you can hear us at pod-o-matic. 

If you are looking to host your podcast, you don't have to use pod-o-matic, but don't use ClickCaster!

• Almost 40% have not disclosed the number of records breached.
• Theft, either internal or external, have been the primary reason for the breach.

We heard a lot about cloud computing at the Gartner show this week. You can read a bit about their take on it here. While we’ve been musing on the different ways we monitor cloud computing resources, Hyperic is already announcing their solution to monitor Amazon’s cloud computing availability. Hyperic believes that “making use of cloud resources would be more popular if the customers had an independent means to monitor cloud services.” They plan to offer the monitoring service to other cloud companies this year. However, John Willis questions the hype of Hyperic.

Here are some interesting NetFlow use stats from our friends at Network Instruments. In a survey they did a few months ago, only 23% of respondents used NetFlow to monitor network performance; 60% didn’t use flow tech and 17% weren’t sure they had anything for it. I have to say we are asked at every Interop show we do if we support NetFlow so the numbers are slightly surprising but useful.

Kuala Lumpur is bullish on Sun’s virtualization strategy.

Just like at the Gartner show, one of the tracks at the Burton Group’s conference this week is on virtualization. This post on the Data Center Strategies blog covers Day 1 with some interesting notes on where virtualization needs to go, from clarity around software licensing and support to the use of raw storage (connecting VMs directly to LUNs) to improve VM performance, provide better integration with storage and data management solutions, and prevent vendor lock-in.

ShareThis

Sevcik and Wetzel have a consistently interesting column on Application Performance Management at NetworkWorld. This week, they unveiled the results of a benchmarking survey that tells them mid-sized enterprises have it harder when it comes to deploying such solutions.

We agree; it’s why we exist. Mid-sized enterprises have the same IT problems but not nearly the same amount of resources as the really big guys to throw against solving them.

VMWare’s acquisition of B-hive continues to generate buzz for performance management and virtualization. I love this quote from the CEO of Aternity, “The next big frontier is the ability to transform huge amounts of data into actionable business intelligence that correlates across platforms.” Um, we’re already doing this. What would be the purpose of collecting hundreds of millions of data points if you couldn’t actually present the data in a meaningful way? Maybe his comment was taken out of context and it’s more about the fact that it’s often difficult to get consistent and accurate info on virtualization resource utilization stats in particular. That we totally agree with. Another take on the B-hive acquisition: VMTN blog gives a quick overview of what it means for infrastructure groups and virtual environments.

ShareThis

A total of 155 trouble tickets were opened in the four days that the help desk was operational. Of these tickets:

• 91 were opened by exhibitors, these were opened by 75 different booths (of about 500).
  • 28 were to report slow or no connections. Of these only 6 were related to the network (all before the show opened), usually they were things like patch cables not pushed all the way in. The remaining 22 were user error. Another interesting stat is that four of the tickets came from the same networking vendor and in each case it was their own gear that was misconfigured. I guess as users we shouldn’t feel bad when we have trouble getting configs right.
  • The other 63 were change requests with the most common being a request to move an internet drop from one location in a booth to another.
• Two tickets were proactively opened by the InteropNet NOC team to notify/warn a vendor that a machine in their booth was infected and performing malicious scans of the network, in order to try and spread the infection. Without naming names here, it’s interesting that one of the companies was a security company and the other a very large software company.
• The remaining tickets were largely opened to track that activities of the NOC and InteropNet deployment teams as they deployed, tuned and maintained the network over the course of the show.

So what does this mean? It means that less about 15% of the exhibitors ran in to something that required them to open a ticket with the help desk and that in reality only 21% of those tickets were for valid issue, meaning only about 3% of the exhibitors actually had any issues. Further analysis shows that for the tickets where there actually was an issue, the issue was resolved in an average of 50 minutes, with the quickest in 11m and the longest at 2hr 39m. Finally, not a single valid exhibitor ticket was open during show floor hours. All issues occurred before the show began during the set-up phase.

Overall I think that these stats point to an efficient help desk and trouble shooting process that was facilitated by the link between the EM7 Trouble Ticketing system and Network Monitoring components that allowed quick validation of tickets so that the right teams could be dispatched.

ShareThis