Event Trending and Data Visualization Timelines

Often our monitoring systems cause so much noise it’s hard to spot any trends in events. We could be witnessing the gradual downfall of a critical system but we’re too busy closing off alerts or deleting the notification emails to see the pattern of events and put the pieces together.

Service Modelling and traditional threshold style monitoring are great for spotting immediate problems, and discovering the depth of impact from an event but they don’t help you see trends in activity.

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Guide To Service Availability Reporting

Being able to put a nice round percentage figure on your critical services availability is a very attractive piece of information for management and overall SLA Management. Having all the latest and greatest monitoring tools and technology is great for keeping the lights on, and assuring uptime, but all this technology mumbo jumbo doesn’t translate into a business compatible language.

Often we have terabytes of data, thousands and thousands of active alerts and performance trending metrics, although we really only need a select few key pieces of information to keep the business happy, the main one being availability.

Availability can be tricky to obtain, and although the formula for actually calculating the figure isn’t a difficult one, the source data and its reliability is where the complexities lie.

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vBulletin To IP.Board – A Short Journey

Cheyne Wallace is a Sydney based Monitoring / Platform Engineer and Availability Manager – http://www.cheynewallace.com
http://www.soundpunk.com is the SMF site mentioned in this article to be converted to IPB

A long time SMF user , iv been growing a community based on an Simple Machines Forum for many years, and I have to say, its been great.
SMF has never given me troubles, I had complete control over my styles and templates, wrote several mods my self without ever really needing to understand the core system.

Upgrading the platform was dead simple, login to your panel one day and it tells you a new update is available, click update, it pulls the files down, checks that it wont break anything and prompts you to continue, all in all about a 1 minute procedure. Simple, (No pun intended)

SMF is great, although like many, the time has come for my community to expand, we often have people writing full length articles and posting in the forum, only to have them be bumped back into oblivion and never seen again, either that or end up with 400 sticky posts which is just messy.

I need a CMS, I need blogging, I need to post articles, and host downloads properly not as attachments. Im not interested in messy WordPress and Joomla bridges , despite the fact a WordPress blog is exactly what I want, iv been down that path before and it always turned out messy.

Fast forward to about December 2009, im looking around for a new solution, iv been a fairly big forum user over the years and I was very aware of vBulletin and its standing in the web community.

I begin investigating vBulletin licensing, my eyes widen as I see a new product is being launched over at vBulletin.com – vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite Continue reading “vBulletin To IP.Board – A Short Journey” »

Piracy and R18+ Games

So another game has been banned from Australia (Aliens vs Predator), and this time the developers are refusing to censor the content.

And I don’t blame them.

Why spend years developing and testing a game, finally deeming it ready for production only to have some narrow minded Government on the opposite side of the world tell you It needs to be re-edited so a 14 year old can buy it. I know what id tell them. Continue reading “Piracy and R18+ Games” »

Canon DSLR Range Basic Overview

Canon DSLR cameras come in 3 different target groups, which results in 3 different price brackets.  Ill attempt to summarize as simply as possible what these groups are and hopefully clear up any confusions you may have with the Model numbering.

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Dear FireFox, Call Me When You’re Sober

Dear FireFox,

I wish I could say this to you in person although I fear that I may not be able to go through with it.

You’ve been my rock for so many years and you held my hand while I was weaning off Internet Explorer, and I thank you for that, but you’ve changed.

Continue reading “Dear FireFox, Call Me When You’re Sober” »

SteerMouse For Mac OSX

Hardest part about moving to a mac was Apples terrible mouse acceleration system and its highly in-accurate  USB rate … It basically made it impossible to do the graphic design work that I used to do on a PC.   Anybody coming from a PC to a mac that does any sort of accurate mouse work will know what im talking about . . . Steermouse fixes that problem and gets your mouse running smooth as silk  .. I highly recommend it ! http://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/

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We’ve had an overhaul and many of the older articles have new URL’s. Please check the various categories for the one your after,

Common RAID Levels

So you’re a home user , your not an engineer , your not an admin but you’re a computer enthusiast , you wouldn’t have a clue what RAID 5 Parity is , but you know what an IDE device is.  As an enthusiast your computer is a massive part of your life. You keep everything on there.  Your photos, your videos, your emails , your porn …. All the important stuff, but as any computer enthusiast, engineer, admin, tech will know …  Hard drives just don’t last.   Iv had hard drives only 3 months old die on me, yea sure I can get it back on warrantee, but who cares? IV LOST ALL MY DATA ! , I couldn’t care less about the price of the hard drive, it’s my gigs and gigs of photos and music iv lost that’s got me tearing my hair out. Continue reading “Common RAID Levels” »

Introduction To Powershell (Move Over Bash)

For years UNIX/Linux administrators have looked down on the windows environment,one of the main reasons being that windows did not have a nice CLI. UNIX has always had sh, bash, ksh which are great shells. Microsoft has now introduced Windows PowerShell (Codename MONAD) a very powerful .NET based shell. A shell is a great tool for system administrators to automate tasks. Continue reading “Introduction To Powershell (Move Over Bash)” »