Nagios is an invaluable tool to help monitor a customer's infrastructure. Last year, I explained how easy it was to be able to integrate Network Appliance health checks. In fact, Nagios provides a plethora of out of the box plugins. Additional plugins are available...
Are you missing out on reaching 25% of the US population with your current software engineering project? Maybe the elderly, at 13% of the population, aren't part of your target market, or maybe it's the 12% of the US population who are disabled that you aren't...
Developed by Electric Cloud, Electric Commander is an extremely versatile tool for enhancing and automating your organization’s software development build-test-deploy cycle. Commander makes it possible to eliminate unnecessary lag time between phases of the...
Get insight into your laptop’s status and taking some precautions with CPUID’s Hardware Monitor and CPU-Z and Belarc Advisor It happens to most laptops eventually. After two or more years of heavy (ab)use, most of our laptops are not in the condition they were...
IT outsourcing relationships can be fraught with challenges, ranging from communications breakdowns between client and provider to issues surrounding performance. If an IT outsourcing agreement isn’t meeting your company’s expectations (e.g. SLA targets are missed;...
Software asset management tools, particularly license usage and monitoring software are gaining more and more interest among large corporations. It should come as no surprise since by utilizing such tools they stand to gain upwards to 10% in cost reductions and that...
When on the internet, there's always concerns of security. If you're listening on some services but not others, you need to modify the Linux firewall to allow this. Also, if there's undesirable clients accessing ports and hacking, IPTables is an effective...
The core activities of configuration management (i.e. changeset management and release management) are essential to control the changes made to a system and to administer the release of its different versions. However getting it wrong damages your brand, customer...
All of us who work in software development want the products that we release to be high quality, and also low cost to maintain in the field. This is no big revelation; it’s common knowledge, and it’s common sense. It’s not clear that there is any silver bullet in...
Bugs can be introduced anywhere in the software development lifecycle, from the early stages (requirements gathering etc) right up to the final shipping of the project. The most expensive types of bugs to fix are those introduced earliest and fixed latest. For...
Holes in your IT infrastructure can make for some awkward situations. Whether you're dealing with sensitive customer information, upcoming product designs, or simply just don't want people messing with your stuff, maintaining system integrity can be difficult....
IT outsourcing contracts, as noted in a recent blog post, should be treated as living documents -- continuously evaluated, refined, and optimized over time. Not only do business conditions continually change, but it’s also important for outsourcing customers to...
