If you are interested in monitoring and successfully set up a system for your own use, there comes a moment when you go from watching systems that you care about, to monitoring systems that other people care about. This is where things get especially tricky. In your new role, you will find yourself answering certain questions repeatedly.
Over the course of 20 years as a monitoring specialist, I've come to think of them as "The Four Questions," modeled after the four questions that are asked during the Passover meal, or Seder. Once framed in that context, I started to see other connections, lessons, and insights between the Passover Seder and IT generally, and monitoring specifically.
I've realized that successful monitoring solutions often address these questions up-front, while those installations which weren't prepared for the four questions were often unsuccessful.
In this book, I describe the four common questions and their answers, and show how to structure your monitoring solution in order to answer the questions (and as a result, provide monitoring services) successfully.
Author Biography:
In a career spanning three decades and four countries, Leon Adato has been an actor, electrician, carpenter, stage combat instructor, pest control technician, Sunday school teacher, and ASL interpreter. He also occasionally worked on computers. Leon got his start teaching computer classes, worked his way up the IT food chain from desktop support to server support to desktop environment standardization engineer and onward, to systems monitoring, management, and automation. Along the way, he discovered a weird love for taking tests, and picked up an alphabet's worth of certifications, including WPCR, CNE, A+, MCP, MCSE, MCSE+I, CCNA, and SCP. Leon spent almost 20 years honing his monitoring skills at companies that ranged in scale from modest (10-100 systems), to moderate (1-3,000 systems) to ludicrous (250,000 systems in 5,000 locations), becoming proficient with a variety of tools and solutions along the way Rabbi Davidovich is a native of Montreal. He is a musmach of Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Baltimore, where he also served as a rabbinic intern at Congregation Shomrei Emunah under Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hirsh Weinreb. He was rabbi of Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Newport News, Virginia, from 2001 until he came to HJC in September of 2006. The Rabbi and his wife Deena have five children.
