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.

Last week I had the honor to server as a Tech Field Day delegate and hear a presentation by SolarWinds. SolarWinds is primarily known as a Network Monitoring and Management company. Over the years, they’ve built a large community of IT Pros who use their software. I first learned about them through the tools SolarWinds provides for free, such as the TFTP server app. Back when I was in charge of managing network equipment like routers and switches, the TFTP server was a lifesaver for updating switch firmware. Later, I would use their Network Performance Monitor (NPM) tool to track the performance of the overall network. I was curious to see where SolarWinds was at this point in time as well as to get a glimpse of where they might be headed.

Rules for SysAdmins - Keep Systems and Monitoring Seperate

SolarWinds - Moving Monitoring in the Right Direction