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The Best in IT from 2016: A Year in Review

January 16, 2017 No Comments

Featured article by Kong Yang, Head Geek, SolarWinds

Disruptive digital forces like cloud, mobile, hybrid IT, BYOD, virtualization, and the hyperconvergence of infrastructure services are upending the data center as we know it. Add to this the increasing reliance on applications and the need for ever-greater application performance, and it’s clear to see that the role of the IT professional is more demanding and complex than ever.

To spotlight just how demanding and complex it has become, we at SolarWinds recently asked our THWACK community of more than 130,000 IT professionals to share their biggest IT challenges and accomplishments during 2016. A few of our favorites are listed below. Maybe you can relate to some of these, but all are a reminder of the challenges we modern day IT professionals face day in and day out, including the challenges of monitoring and managing increasingly complex IT environments.

Problem Solvers: IT Edition

IT pros troubleshooting their way to the top

– “One day I got a call from our VP of IT who was screaming, ‘The network is DOWN!’ at our corporate tech center. Of course, my team knew that wasn’t true, because we would have had alarms going off left and right if it were. Upon consulting our network performance monitoring system, we discovered that the utilization for the internet pipe was at 100 percent. After deeper digging, we identified the three computers that were eating up all of the bandwidth: three test engineers had set up their own World of Warcraft server in their office and were downloading the ISOs for the game via Peer to Peer. It was game over when the VP of IT heard about that!”

– “Earlier this year, another department in our company set up a process that initiated an internal website that ran its script behind the scenes, and let them automatically perform routine tasks on a chosen computer. However, the task would never flag as complete and re-queue for the next day, hanging in a running state, or error-out completely. My solution was to employ our department’s web monitoring tool. It worked! The tool not only alerted us of failures and verified that the site loaded successfully, but would also trigger the script, allowing the process to complete and run on a daily schedule.”

Inspector Gadget

IT pros who have discovered interesting or unexpected things lurking in the data center

– “Not long ago, I looked at my network discovery and found that a major city’s geopolitical network (routers, switches, printers, servers, etc.) was unexpectedly hosted behind my firewall, on my LAN and WAN, without any new physical connectivity. Naturally, no one in that city’s IT support team knew anything about the routers, including that they had no security or that they were on my network! It just so happened that my WAN provider was also the WAN provider for that city and someone in their team had inadvertently spanned a number of physical WAN ports with the wrong VLANs, and the city ended up on my LAN as a result. I had direct access to state government resources through the city’s link to their state offices. Imagine what IU could have found before the issue was resolved!”

– “I remember one instance where, during a round of routine checks, I found an errant process in a client’s PC and server assets that would lock up and run instances of the same process multiple times, causing the CPU to run multiple threads and become overwhelmed. This caused the CPU temperature to spike, and thanks to ineffective ventilation of the workstation itself, it would stall. I went back to the developers who created the HCI applications, and told them about this errant process. Several bug reports resulted in a patch, which was administered on this workstation, resolving crashes, regulating CPU temperature, and increasing performance. I was able to go back to the customer with a proper solution.”

Hero Supped Up: The Rise to Greatness

IT pros who rose to the occasion

– “I was just an intern when my company started thinking about implementing a new monitoring toolset to accommodate our recent growth. They needed someone to add the nodes. We’re a pretty busy team, so why not leave it to the intern, right? I accepted the challenge. When the team saw me take initiative, and get these nodes into our new tools in just a few days, they were suitably impressed. They decided to hire me full time before I even graduated!

– “As a relatively new IT admin, I was hired to help fix a network that spanned several global sites with (surprisingly) no monitoring in place whatsoever. It was a definite trial by fire. End-users complained of slow internet links, outages, and file transfers that wouldn’t finish. After installing a host of new tools to try and untangle the mess, we immediately found end-users running through their own proxy servers, and authentication happening through geographic sites that shouldn’t have been happening. We also found that the network was extremely flat, with layer 2 tunnels extending broadcast domains to remote sites. Since then, we’ve been able to map out a plan using real data from the network to properly design our LANs and WAN segments. We can now save end-users from themselves!”

 

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