NJC: Day 3
I got an early start this day because I woke early for no real reason. So I headed into the office, had some breakfast there (grilled cheese with fried egg and coffee, thanks for asking) and got down to work.
That meant installing Evernote for OS X so I could attach a PDF to a note, then using the information I’d gathered there to write up a proposal concerning alerting. I am trying to be thorough in documenting what I do and why. I tried to capture my thinking, rationalize my decision, and foreshadow future developments. As part of the research for the writing I think I noticed something odd about Pingdom’s pricing.
I’m probably misunderstanding something. But if the costs per check aren’t different at the Business plan level, and I don’t care about SMS notifies, what is my incentive to ever leave the Basic plan? My efficient frontier seems like it’s up and to the left and with a linear progression, it’s a Basic ballgame.
If the cost per check on the business plan is less, then the graph is wrong and there is a break-even point on the expense of checks. But it sure doesn’t look like it.
I ran my proposal for additional monitoring past my boss and got his buy-in and then started deploying it. So that’s my first operational task which is not entirely reactive in nature; there had been an issue earlier with a system going away and no one noticing, but it wasn’t a production system and I was more interested in getting some kind of alerting going for those systems as they come online.
I fully expect to be iterating on the deployed monitoring solution, as it was a trade-off between results and costs (financial and my time/effort/brain) and there are arguably better solutions I didn’t feel like I could invest enough into at this point to get the most out of. It’s a starting point, an incremental improvement over what the company had in place before me.
This wasn’t quite a No Changes Friday (the only religious holiday I observe) but it seemed worth it to push through that sabbath to get additional awareness of the environment. Arguably it didn’t impact anything production-related, beyond the tiny additional impact of the monitoring checks being done, which are all tickling network listening daemons.
Then I spent the rest of my day researching options for my next proposal, which will be SSL related.
