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| Eva Luna Rosado @Pinterest.com |
A real Network Admin Christmas tale...
You know that saying “when
something can go wrong, it will”. A few years ago around Christmas I
experienced it in flesh and blood. I was
having a nice quiet dinner with the family and a few of my relatives who had
flown in from Denver, Colorado. We were just about to start our meal when I got
a call on my cell phone from one of the network guys from the company I work
for. When I picked up the phone I could tell that this guy was distraught, to
say the least. In a trembling voice he told me that one of the windows services
had gone down and that he was new and didn’t know what to do. I tried
explaining the procedure to restart the service through the phone to no avail,
since he later realized that he didn’t even have the necessary credentials to
perform any actions on the server. It was clear that I was going to have to
leave my family and friends and get in my car to start a two hour drive to my
office. Of course, you can imagine my wife’s reaction when I broke the news to
her. She was furious; she even threatened me with divorce claiming that I was
too focused on my job. I was about to retaliate with some harmful words but
then I started thinking that she was right, there should be no reason at all
that could justify me leaving my family in the middle of our Christmas dinner.
But as we all know, when you’re just an employee you do what needs to be done
or your job is in jeopardy. So with a heavy heart I left the house and stormed
back to the office where it took me just a few minutes to solve the issue, but
it was too late to make it up to my family.
Well, believe it or not, when
next Christmas rolled around I got the same call. This time, an alert had been
triggered in SCOM and nobody from the network team was in the office. As soon I
got the call my wife started pacing back and forth with a look in her face that
could turn the toughest man into stone. So as soon as I got off the phone I
turned to her and before she could start spewing fire out of her nostrils, I
told her that this time I had Xian Wings to back me up. If you’re not familiar
with Xian Wings, let me give you a small introduction. Wings is an application
developed by Jalasoft that allows you to have your Operations Manager Console
directly on your mobile device or tablet. You can perform various actions and
tasks directly from your device, like:
- Close, assign or modify any OpsMgr alert remotely
- Use Powershell directly from your iPad to immediately run any commands or scripts against your OpsMgr server or any computer
- Restart any windows service directly from your mobile device or iPad
- Be immediately notified about any new OpsMgr alerts on your smartphone or tablet
- Generate and share through email any OpsMgr performance graph or alert on iPad
- Easily create a monitoring dashboard in iPad
So to make a
long story short, I had no need to go back to the office, I simply closed the
open alert from my tablet after verifying that it wasn’t anything critical.
Then I restarted a few of the windows services and sent a performance graph to
my colleagues email to see how this event had affected our network. All this took me just a few minutes, no need
to make a long drive or a bunch of phone calls and emails and no need to get
into it with the wife again. My better half was so happy thinking that work had
finally taken a backseat to family, that I even got a personal gift from her
later on that night.
It’s
incredible how a simple application which you can get at a very low price can
have such a huge effect on your life and can help make things much easier for
everyone.
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