Tech Notes

One of Virtual Instruments’ missions is to reduce the big, messy outages that happen in our customers’ datacenters. For many sectors across the industry, we work to determine ways to catch problems early to avoid outages. Numerous competitors have analytics engines and all kinds of software to detect problems before they become outages, but they are not all equal.

A few weeks ago, I was reviewing a customer’s successful datacenter migration.  Their strategy for success when using VirtualWisdom is to tag all the tickets that result from our solution. The IT staff is told to do the VirtualWisdom tickets first, and the customer found that over time, the number of reactive tickets decreased. What was happening was that VirtualWisdom found all the small problems that might otherwise get overlooked, such as: increases in physical errors that precede the failure of a SFP fiber module, the increase of traffic on a link that creeps over the threshold where it won’t successfully fail over to its backup link, and the misconfiguration of a path. VirtualWisdom quietly and diligently finds these problems, and the customer found if they fixed them, bigger problems were avoided.

I wanted to share this policy with my blog readers because it makes a lot of sense and is simple to implement. If anyone else tries this strategy, let me know how well it works for you.