Rules for SysAdmins - Keep Systems and Monitoring Seperate

October 06, 2020 by Nathaniel Avery in Basics, DevOps, Enterprise

There are a number of good practices to follow when setting up and maintaining systems. Some of these rules are obvious and some not so obvious. One of these rules is to make sure your monitoring tools have no dependency on the thing being monitored. While this may seem obvious, lots of organizations still make this mistake. Sometimes it’s not even clear to them that they’ve created such a dependency. Microsoft ran into this very issue last week during an Azure outage situation. As Mary Jo Foley reported in her All About Microsoft Column, the dashboards used by Microsoft to alert customers about the outage were behind the same authentication system that was having issues. If a company with the size and resources of Microsoft can miss this, then so can the average operations, DevOps, and SRE Teams supporting applications.

Azure Stack Benefit - Extended Support for SQL Server 2008 / 2008 R2

May 07, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Enterprise

Microsoft SQL Server is quickly approaching End Of Life. While most customers would prefer to upgrade to the latest release, that’s not always possible. Some customers, especially in large enterprises and government, simply need more time to clean up old code in order to address deprecated features. Others maybe plan to refactor the application completely. Either way, having a few more years to transition would help several user bases. Microsoft heard these concerns and and offered a lifeline. Customers who migrate SQL Servers to Azure cloud will get an additional three years of patches for free. While at Dell Technologies World, I discovered this offer also extends to the on-premises Azure Stack.

Microsoft Edge Based on Chrome is a Win for the Enterprise

April 23, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Install, Enterprise

Microsoft released a new version of it’s Edge web browser based on the chromium engine. This is the same engine that powers Google’s chrome browser. While it seems strange at first for Microsoft to use tech that’s from an outside source, it’s another indication that this is a new Microsoft willing to make radical changes if needed to stay competitive. This decision turns out to be advantageous to Enterprise customers.

Microsoft Azure Exam Change - AZ-100 and AZ-101 Retired for AZ-103

April 06, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Training

On March 20, 2019, Microsoft announced via a blog post changes to the path for earning the Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate certification. The path has been simplified in that it now requires a single exam, AZ-103 in order to achieve the credential. Those who complete exam AZ-100 before May 1, 2019 will also be certified. Previously, candidates had to complete exams AZ-100 and AZ-101 to become certified.

Podcast Appearance! - The On-Premise IT Roundtable

March 25, 2019 by Nathaniel Avery in Appearances

I’m still getting used to this whole podcast thing, but I appeared on one recently. I had the immense honor of sharing a panel with some fellow Tech Field Day delegates as we discussed the future of Microsoft Windows.

I’ve embedded the video below. I’ve also included a link to the audio.

I recommend going to the Gestalt IT On-Premise website to check out so many more awesome conversations https://gestaltit.com/category/podcast/

Slack Buying Hipchat is Good for ChatOps

August 01, 2018 by Nathaniel Avery in DevOps

Chat tools vendors Slack and Atlassian last week announced a partnership where Atlassian's two ChatOps apps, Hipchat and Stride would be shut down and the existing users could migrate onto Slack. Atlassian also agreed to a financial investment in Slack as part of the terms. A lack of competition in the ChatOps space seems detrimental on the surface, however, it could be the best thing for the sector long term.