musc@> $daniele.rant | Out-Blog

MOM has always been a great tool out of the box because it sort of FORCED you to implement an Incident Management Process to deal with Alerts, as described here:
http://ianblythmanagement.wordpress.com/2006/07/27/mom-2005-and-itil-part-1/
In fact, Alerts had to be actually set to "Resolved", and this had to be done manually.

I have now been wondering for a while: "How is OpsMgr2007 going to affect this?" I refer to the fact that now OpsMgr2007 does something customers have been asking for a while: it can auto-resolve alerts as soon as the incident/issue is fixed, by monitoring the state of the component rather than waiting for people to resolve it!

Practically, people were often the bottleneck, due to a missing Incident Management Process. MOM has tried for nearly 8 years to push them to implement one… and I feel that it finally gave up even trying.

All the other stuff described in the other two articles of Ian'serie do still apply.

For Capacity Management nothing substantially changes.
Availability Management is greatly improved, with the generic "availability report" and the state roll-up feature provided by the new Health Service and the new ways object are discovered and instantiated and the way their health models work.

Problem Management can also still be done, and Alert tuning will be still required (but it should be slightly easier now, with the improved "overrides" kind of thing).
Service Level Management can also be done – this will actually be done much better: if the system knows you've fixed the incident and it closes the alert for you, SLA calculations will be done on the REAL down/up-times of services, not on people keeping the Alerts open forever like I have seen in many places.
This means it will be done better, WITHOUT relying on people.

All in all there are substantial changes in OpsMgr2007, most of them are for the good…. but still, I think, I will be missing the fact that people have to actively look at their consoles and manage Alerts the way they were asked to do before. I will miss all the talks I used to do about "you HAVE to manage your Alerts/Incidents", now.

I just read this post in which Hugh MacLeod writes critically about Microsoft people writing about themselves and showing off, hoping in the power of an artificially created network to impress people (or that's I get it, at least – maybe it isn't completely that way), instead of letting people talk about the products because they believe they are just cool. He concludes: "[...] [First Rule of Marketing:] If you want to be interesting, don't talk about yourself. Amen. [...]"

You should have OTHER people talk about YOUR stuff because it is really cool.

Self-promotion does usually the opposite effect on peopple these days.

I am not into this: I just talk about technology when I feel like to, and I talk about other stuff when I want to talk about other stuff. And when I talk about technology it is usually about what interests me at that point, be it Microsoft or not. I talk of MOM as well as of Linux, of C# just as much as of Ruby. It depends what I'm hacking with at that point in time. I like cool technology, it does not matter if it comes from one side or another. I even like to integrate them when it makes sense (and it makes sense a lot of times). But I've already written about this here in the past. So I'll stop this rant here.

The start of the new year according to the traditions of Bengal, being welcomed by bengal and indian immigrants in Rome.
Is a great opportunity for integration.
You don't really see many italians walking around, but there are some who do come and talk.

This is happening in Rome, right now, started last sunday and goes on until the end of the month.

For more information:
www.romamultietnica.it/inside.asp?id=166&idNotizia=842

An old photo of Joshua in his Debian T-Shirt has been used (with permission) by Holger Levsen in his presentation of http://www.debian-community.org/ given at FOSDEM 2007.
You can check out the slides here: http://layer-acht.org/slides/20070225-debian-community.org-prelaunch.pdf
and download a video here: http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2007/fosdem/

And yes, I feel very "debiany" today. In fact I just finished upgrading my server from Sarge to Etch and it went very smoothly, even if I had to reconfigure / migrate some settings – for example moving all the virtual server configuration from Apache 1.3 to 2.x … but it was about time for me to move my ass off 1.3! Among other things I am quite glad now I can use mod_mono and have it update with apt-get, instead than having my own compiled version with all sort of broken dependencies… also, it performs better – faster, and takes up the same amount of resources, which I would not have believed and I was in fact slightly concerned about. Nothing to be worried about, it turns out.

Some other guy was pointing me out today all the other improvements in the desktop-feature-space. I would not know, I am a runlevel-2 guy when it comes to linux.

April 8th 2007 it was Easter Sunday.
It was also my mum's birthday.

I had just missed the new, but I am catching up now, that Debian Etch shipped.

What a day!