[As I am snowbound for a couple days, it is the perfect time to create a blog or two.]
Introduction
Each application monitoring solution goes though traditionally a maturity life-cycle. It begins as a brand spanking new product with all the associated charms. This may include lack of documentation and limited functionality. As it matures, becomes fully featured, stabilized, and scalable. A victim of its success, customers find new limitations of functionality and scale. In time, the existing architecture and functionality of the product is retired. Or it is replaced by a major redesign in a subsequent release.
But this life-cycle has sped up due to the 24 by 7 nature of the digital economy and the ever-changing list of operating systems, devices, application/transport/security protocols, etc.
As Alice in Wonderland said, it is the ever constant struggle of going twice as fast just to stay in place.
As a result, there is a dramatic increase in the number of times that a product is new, replaced, or redesigned. This is accompanied by an always shrinking amount of time to learn it. So what does one do to keep their product knowledge current?
The Ongoing Training Struggle
Given such a culture, this blog hopes to begin a dialog on what those in the Community are doing to keep up. Some things that come to mind are the following:
* Bite the Bullet. Scheduling dedicated partial or full days to learn. Some resort to using their weekends for this role.
* Taking shortcuts -- Reading technical communities like this, watching videos, or reading overview documents.
* Quickly understand key functionality and audiences. What is this solution supposed to monitor and not monitor? What out of the box and custom alerting, monitoring, reporting, and metric displays are available?
* Review the solution architecture. Determine the key application components, their related functions ,and workflows.
* Practice install, upgrades, and migrations of the software to learn the various gotchas.
* Once having an installation environment, learn what a "steady state" of healthy system looks like. Otherwise, you will have no idea what to look for when issues occur.
* Focus on:
- Key monitoring and supportability metrics.
- Log names, their functions and levels, and what are normal and unexpected error messages.
- Proactive administration tasks to keep all healthy.
Your Turn
Please respond with the challenge you face in finding training time and once found, your training approach with new or redesigned software. I hope that you take this opportunity to weigh in.