It’s a typical Friday at work. Slow, painfully slow. Not much gets started on a Friday, and not much gets completed.
I’m standing, oddly enough, between 2 positions - one being Sr. Infrastructure Engineer, the other the MS Operations Manager guy. Beginning Monday, my time will be split 50/50 between the two. The MOM gig pays more, and I think I can even get more then what they offer - purely based on the fact I’m the only person even remotely qualified for this position that isn’t attached. I’ve been asked by 3 additional firms if I’d like to try for this position. My current firm is already jockeying for someone to backfill my current roll of reading email and clicking buttons.

Don’t get my wrong, I love to make a metric ton of cash doing nothing but surfing the web and blogging as much as the next guy, but I really wish I had days filled with work and tension - I thrive on pressure. The MOM gig is right up my alley.
It’s a solo thing, there’s almost always only 1 monitoring guy in an organization, no matter how large it is or how many servers it houses. This monitoring guy is in charge of a minimum of 2, maximum of 18, monitoring systems spread throughout the company. It could be something as large and robust as HP OpenView or MS Operations Manager, or it could be Bob’s Script that checks on custom application x34, which runs on a Windows NT 3.5 server, connecting to DB2, and using Bill’s (He left the company 10 years ago) custom connector.
Monitoring, reporting, and alerting is an intrinsically important part of any company, especially if your business is online. What doesn’t make sense is, no one wants to do it. Everyone loathes the thought of writing rule logic to intelligently alert when a cluster goes into a failed state, they run away from trending reports which attempt to figure out when the SAN will need to be expanded, they scurry from the idea of creating color-branded graphs that attempt to lay out the company’s entire IT infrastructure in as few primary colored lines as possible.

I, however, thrive upon it.

I love constructing complex rule logic, ensuring that the proper alerts are sent to the proper parties at the proper time. I feast upon the algorithms that I use to create trend reports. I’m enamored with the prospect of creating custom graphs, showing the progress that a company is making as a whole - I love the fact that something I created, something I made, is being shown to the most powerful people up the ladder. I like it.

It’s not for the feint of heart, that’s for sure. There’s a small sect of us in the midwest that do this type of thing, and we are as fanatical about it as the next Harry Potter fan. We hav e one hand deep in the corporate driven high-dollar professional suites such as MOM and OpenView as well as the archaic deep knowledge of open source free solutions such as Cacti, MRTG, RRD, Nagios and it’s derivatives to numerous to name. It’s not something you become, it’s something you are - an almost asberger-like devotion to the craft. You are timeless, steeped in protocols such as SNMP and Syslog, while also honing your knowledge on XMLRPC and MSMQ. It’s one of the few things that I get visibly excited talking about, my face lighting up as I explain how it can all come together.

I have several projects lined up I want to work on, one involving system and application monitoring. Several other involve industrial art pieces. Another involves electronics. I need to work on those. I hope the new loft will be an inspiration to me. I also hope that canceling my World of Warcraft subscription and getting rid of all the other games on my PC will excel that as well. I need to get my ass in gear an act on some things that could have a high payout in the long term.

How’s that for an ADHD riddled rant? I wonder if anyone can follow my blog except me. I’ll probably have another post later, but figure I should seperate this train of thought with the one that is occurring simultaneously right now, lest they truly clash together into a thought train wreck the likes of which William G. Crush could have never envisioned (I’ll take obscure 19th century train publicity stunts gone bad for $1000, Alex).

Till next time.