Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Scary IT Stories?

October 29, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Scary IT Stories?

TAGS: Open Source

Hyperic is encouraging IT staff to submit their scary stories to the Hyperic blog for a contest called "Nightmare on Web Street." We've all seen the brutal truth of systems gone wrong. Server rooms overheated. Disk crashes. Backing up incorrectly and wiping out a system by mistake. DNS setups that are so complex no one really understands them. Memory leaks that cause a system to grind to a halt. Weird combinations of versions of software that have never been tested together in the real world. Running a brand new 1.0 application without knowing that you're the first and maybe only customer to use it. This stuff happens more often than anyone would admit.

That's why it always surprises me when companies cheap out on monitoring systems. It's not a question of if something will go wrong, it's about when and how fast you'll be able to correct the situation. If you're having trouble getting your boss's attention on this kind of issue, remind them about what happens when systems aren't available to users. No one wants that type of press coverage to be front page news. A little preventative maintenance and monitoring goes a long way. What's the worst that could happen? Well, the worst is pretty ugly actually.

Posted by Zack Urlocker on October 29, 2007 02:50 PM

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