Monitoring needs to move on from traditional fault and performance polling. It should include identifying common misconfigurations and known faults. We’re all using the same technologies, so we’ve all got the same problems. I like the look of Indeni, a new approach to this problem. It uses a form of crowd-sourcing to act as a smart advisor.
We all think we’re precious snowflakes. But we’re not. We use the same technologies, glued together in the same ways. That means we all have the same problems, and make the same misconfigurations.
Vendors frequently publish new bug fixes, KB articles, EOS notices, etc. Some of these apply to products/versions/features we’re using. We struggle to keep up with the volume, and we miss these – so maybe our network is running with a known issue. Striking an unknown bug is bad. Getting caught out by a published issue is worse. Having an outage because we didn’t make sure the routing tables were in sync on our firewall cluster is unforgivable.
Information flow is a two-way problem. The vendors can’t always see how customers deploy their products in the real world. They think they know. They write manuals, they write Continue reading