I’m working in an environment where priorities and tasks change a lot.
Unfortunately, this leads to leaving out process and technology improvements but instead continuing to work with old technology setups and bulky solutions.
As people feel sad about this, ‘we should’ and ‘maybe’ are used a lot. In order to get back on the right track, I adopted a cigarette advertising slogan, getting rid of the unhealthy context:
Download the full-scale version here.
Hi,
Having worked for a number of years in bigger and smaller sized companies, I tended to find monitoring tool quite boring. They naturally belong to server operating as they alarm staff in case of system errors, full disks etc.
After some additional thoughts, I came to my personal conclusion that monitoring is the core of IT operating. Monitoring tools are the eyes and ears of the administrators. They are the primary source of information that people work with – or should work with.
Maybe my earlier conclusion was due to bad implementation, both on process level and on system level for eventing and alerting. I recently discovered this great presentation:
https://speakerdeck.com/obfuscurity/the-state-of-open-source-monitoring
which really is an eye-opener. Read it and you will probably come to a similar conclusion like me.
One of the systems described here is Graphite. Unfortunately, the system does not run on Windows, my preferred development system. I’ve successfully ported Graphite to Windows using help from some friends. I’ll post my experience and a guide on this as soon as possible.
Stay tuned.
You know and probably use Google Mail and Google Calendar. You might even synchronize information from these applications like contacts and appointments to iPhone or another smartphone using Googles really nice Mobile Sync service. This service implements the Exchange Active Sync protocol and thus features push synchronization.
Even if you should not use these Google applications originally, you should consider to give them a shot. Maybe not to use the web interface but rather to use Google as a pure synchronization platform.
If you use Outlook for managing your contacts and appointments, gSyncIt is a really nice shareware you should try. Unfortunately it is not known very well.
The alternative Outlook synchronization solution from Google, Google Calendar Sync, has some serious bugs but is only poorly supported. So I don’t recommend using it.
If you use Thunderbird as a mail client, the nice plugin Zindus is available to synchronize contacts.
Unfortunately, the data formats for contacts do not match 100% but nevertheless: this scenario should work for most use cases.
The ranking for iPhone synchronization imho is:
A service that builds on Google as a synchronization platform is Rainmaker. It allows to enrich existing contact data using information available on Facebook and LinkedIn.
Finally, I now arrived in blogosphere. Took quite long to get me there.
Hope I can provide some useful information in my posts.
Stephan
