Sometimes thoughts last for days because they are prompted by something new each day. My ramblings yesterday about questions have been stoked by a story from The Coyote Within and by comments from Richard Schwartz.
To update someone else’s catch-phrase – ‘It’s the questions, stupid’.
I have been catching up on some reading, today’s reading was: Monitoring and Troubleshooting Microsoft.com a really interesting article on how Microsoft have constructed their organisation and technology to tackle the operation of one of the world’s busiest Internet sites.
A few things struck me.
They obviously have the same monitoring problems as the rest of us:
“Left to their default configurations, most monitoring systems generate an excessive number of alerts that become like spam to administrators. Especially with large systems, it is important for organizations to carefully define what should be monitored and what events or combination of events should be raised to the attention of operations personnel. An organization must also plan to learn from the data collected. As with alert planning, this aspect of the solution is a significant undertaking. It requires creating data retention and aggregation policies, and combining and correlating all of the data into a data warehouse from which administrators can generate both predefined and impromptu reports.”
But have got to a point where:
“The overall system processes over 60,000 alerts a day, conducts approximately 11.5 million availability tests a day, parses 1.7 terabytes of IIS log data a day, and collects 185 million performance counters a day at a sampling rate of 45 seconds. However, to reach this degree of monitoring sophistication was a long process and required significant effort and cross-organizational coordination.”
I’m not sure whether those numbers indicate ‘monitoring sophistication’ or not.
The other thing was the ability of Microsoft to leverage internal resources and to operate a continuous improvement methodology that genuinely improved things. These things are incredibly difficult in large organisations.
“After implementing and stabilizing the asset management and reactive monitoring systems, the focus of the operations team shifted to proactive testing of applications and defining proactive monitoring events.”
and
“The testing process also helps to determine what events are meaningful, and what corrective actions are appropriate in the case of those events. All of the information learned from transactional and stress testing is thoroughly documented as part of the release management process of the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) that many of the development teams use.”
and
“The operations team wants to create a common eventing and logging class, based on recommendations from the Microsoft Patterns and Practices group, with deep application tracing.”
It’s very easy to implement something and then to leave it alone because it’s working, that is until it stops working. When it stops working that’s when the problems start because people expect thing to be as they left them when they implemented them and they never are. Changes occur, the best thing you can do is make sure the changes contribute to improvement rather than to service entropy.
The other day I was questioning whether we had reached a point of international writers block. Today, out of the blue and via an unexpected link I came across Slow Leadership.
Slow Leadership opposes the pressure for homogeneity in leadership, especially the urge to equate leadership purely with getting short-term results. That’s the equivalent of defining diet as fast food—an endless supply of burgers, fries and sodas—just because that type of meal is quick, simple and cheap. Leadership is far more than producing results in short order. Leadership is the art of finding the right way forward, not just for today but for as far ahead as you can reasonably see. It’s not an activity that can be reduced to simplistic rules-of-thumb and numbered lists of “to-dos.” There’s no Leadership 101 to cover all normal situations; no Leadership-by-Numbers kit you can buy via the Internet.
Yes please – I’ll take some Slow Leadership.
I love having a new thought stream, something that gets me thinking.
I like reading i, cringley because it makes me laugh. Does someone really get paid to put together supposition, rumour and hear-say with some really paranoid conspiracy theories. He’s obviously a much smarter man than I am.
The last post on Apple and it’s domination strategy and the fact that he thinks buying Adobe would bring it to fruition was great.
You’ll have to read the article to understand some of the things I am rabbiting on about here.
He says that he is talking about an application strategy – which he equates to an ‘Office’ strategy. Wow, what a mistake.
‘Office’ capabilities are a huge set of the capabilities that people use day-to-day, but having been involved in desktop transformations since there have been desktop transformation I can tell you that the volume of applications other than ‘Office’ are the issue. In order for Apple to overcome this ‘inertia’ they need to be able to guarantee, and I mean guarantee, that all of the applications are going to work with whatever compatibility technology they are going to make available. That is a massive risk for most businesses and not one that they will be willing to take on.
The other point he makes is that ‘Windows is far more vulnerable today than it was then from a security standpoint.’ That’s an interesting view, most other people seem to be tackling this from a different perspective – Windows XP SP2 is good enough. And just because Windows is vulnerable it doesn’t make Office vulnerable. OpenOffice has been around for a good few years now, but it still hasn’t built anything like a dominant position even though it’s free.
Anyway it made me laugh.
The FT has an interesting article about the challenges of email management which features Marc Smith from Microsoft Research.
The line I really like is this one:
“No one is giving me more heartbeats per day or more minutes; there is no Moore’s Law for humans. I am not becoming twice as intelligent and half as cheap; if anything the cost is going up and I’m slowing down. Given the real limits of human cognition, the machines – who have, after all, gotten us into this mess – are going to have to get us out of it.”
Sounds like he is describing me.
The Filling Cabinet points to a new White Paper on Single Instance Storage in Windows Server 2003 R2 Storage Server.
(Please, please can we start simplifying some of these names).
Single Instance Storage is only available in Storage Server, according to Clive Watson anyway.
For someone who works for a large services organisation this is interesting news.
“For some time it has been apparent to us, and to other companies in our industry, that there is excess capacity in certain geographies, particularly Europe,” Honeycutt said. “After lengthy consideration, we have decided that this is an appropriate time to deal with the issue through a restructuring; this action is designed to enhance shareholder value regardless of any strategic alternatives we may explore.”
Tags: CSC
Apparently Virtual Server R2 Enterprise Edition is now free. This follows on from a similar announcement from VMWare. I’m sure though that Microsoft’s argument will be that they aren’t following, rather that Longhorn will make virtualisation a commodity and they are just bringing the benefit in early.
Oh, and because it’s the Enterprise Edition that’s free, it effectively makes the Standard Edition a redundant product.
They also announced that Linux would now be ‘supported’ as a ‘host’ at LinuxWorld (where else).
Will this make a huge difference to most IT users – I don’t think so. But it will probably make a huge difference to a whole load of testers and developers.
Will this make a difference to VMWare? Probably. Although the VMWare product set is more mature, the challenge is whether people will initially choose a free product from a company they already deal with (Microsoft) or an organisation they don’t (VMWare). That makes it more difficult for VMWare to move people up to the full featured ESX product. And if people are making a choice for a development project today will they be expecting to deploy it on Longhorn server anyway.
On a slightly different question, if ‘virtual’ is the normal way of doing it is it still ‘virtual’?
via Adam’s Mindspace, Clive Watson, John Howard
Tags: Virtual Server, Microsoft, VMWare, Linux
I would like to be able to tell my email client not to process new mail.
Yesterday I was determined to knuckle down and finish a piece of work so I turned my email client and my RSS reader off. I’m a great procrastinator and if I can be interrupted I will.
(43 Folders has an interesting post today on “The frazzled attention of the ‘always on’”)
The problem was this. I needed to keep starting my email client to retrieve information for the piece of work, I had tried to copy it all before I shut the email client down, but I had forgotten some bits. Every time I started the email client it processed all of the waiting email and I just couldn’t stop myself having a look and processing it. I want to be able to tell my email clients (both of them) that I am busy, in the same way as I can my IM clients.
I get a lot of people hitting this site searching for information on Single Instance Storage.
I wrote about this a while ago.
Today Microsoft have published a paper on their usage of it they are claiming a 25% to 40% reduction in on disk capacity.
(Thanks for the comments on the picture Stu)
Graham Chastney 