How to Manage, pt. 1

See if you can relate to this:

1) Show up at work
2) Start to check email
3) Receive calls from people with login issues or computers that won't boot
4) Run around for the morning fixing issues
5) While running around, meet more people with problems
6) Fix these problems on top of the previous problems
7) Get back to desk
8) Start working on project you were working on yesterday
9) Get more calls about more problems
10) Run around fixing problems
11) Meet more people with problems
12) Get home late - meet angry spouse (and you never did finish checking email!)

This is what we technology professionals refer to as a "Bad Thing". It's what I have been trying to overcome. It just felt like it should be possible to stop fire-fighting and start managing the network in a proactive manner. I'm not there yet, but here's what I'm trying to do to improve the situation.

In the past I have recommended Spiceworks. I've tried it and it is a great product. It inventories hardware and software, includes a helpdesk, has some nice reporting features and comes for the low, low price of free. It's easy to set up, doesn't use agents for the inventory and did I mention it is free? I recommend it highly but have stopped using it.

For all it's good points, there were two problems for me. (Mind you, this is v2.0 I am discussing. I have not tried v3.0.) The bigger problem of the two is that Spiceworks was designed to max out at 200 PCs. The school I work for has about 250 computers. Things were starting to bog down. The other problem is that, despite it's $0 dollar price tag, it isn't open source.

I'm not a raving OSS fanboi, but I think public school systems need to support open source products. I'm not ditching our Microsoft Terminal Servers or XP Pro PCs. I just think that where it's possible, we should seek out open source solutions. So while I would have no problem using Spiceworks if it scaled better to our needs, I wasn't too upset to leave it behind in search of OSS products. But which ones?

My next move was to try out Zenoss. Zenoss has both commercial and OSS versions. Of course, I'm running the open source version. Where this product shines for me is in server log centralization. I never had time to check each server's logs for problems. (Kinda like email.) As a result, I generally found out about server problems when someone else noticed it. Now I am able to quickly scan all my servers for issues and deal with the big ones before anyone else notices them.

Zenoss also includes performance monitoring and uptime monitoring. It monitors printer messages too. There's also addons (called ZenPacks) to add additional functionality. It's definitely worth a look.

One word of warning about the Zenoss virtual appliance. It is a great way to try out the product, but it has a very small virtual hard drive. I ran it out of space in a couple months. In trying to resize the disk, I corrupted the whole thing. I ended up creating an Ubuntu server and installing Zenoss from the repositories. Do yourself a favor, don't plan on running a production server on the appliance.

Zenoss wasn't a complete solution for me. Maybe I could write my own ZenPack to meet all of my needs, but I'd heard about something else I wanted to try. I'm going to discuss that on Thursday along with my grand plan for world domination getting out of firefighting mode.