n-able

Yeah, in parallel to the last post, N-able should definitely use the blue icons for disconnected instead of using red x's for everything. What's more, it should show the percentage of failures and not just a all or nothing picture. For example, let's say I have a customer with 100 devices and 5 services per device (services are the variables being monitored which can be Cpu, disk space, applications installed, etc.). If just one of those services on one device is malfunctioning, I get a big red x when I look at the customer. Like this: It doesn't bother to notate that 99 of the devices are functioning fine!

n-able

Long time since I've posted...

Ok, this is going to be a page to complain about a certain product known as "N-Central 6.5 SP2" made by a company named N-Able. I usually refer to the product as N-Able so forgive me if there's any confusion.

Anyway...

Gripe #1: When I do the NOC or All Customer View it almost always shows customers with Red X's making it look like most of the customers devices are failing. When in fact it's usually due to a few workstations that are turned off. And that's what I can't understand, how can a monitoring probe be intelligent enough to get performance and capacity metrics on everything from CPU's to DNS to Exchange to Sql Server and yet it doesn't know when a device is just turned off! How the hell am I supposed to show this to a customer when there are red x's everywhere?

Dude Dell - Firefox Snafu

http://partner.dell.com/ is down. Well, I think it's down. Nevermind, It's just not working with firefox.

P.S. I'm going to start posting twitter-length blogs (~140 characters max)

parallelism

In social sciences we say, "Correlation is not causation"

I think the computer science version would be, "Temporal Contiguity does not equal causation"

Let me explain. Many people, myself included, think that because error y happens right after event x that event x must have caused error y. But event x could have caused event t which stopped protocol a from working causing error 1. There, now you got it.

a few of my favorite things

Just spent the last hour playing a protein-folding game. That's right, a computer game about protein-folding. If you wanna play, go here: http://fold.it/portal/adobe_main. It's addictive and it has the bonus of benefiting medical science.

Also, I love Pandora.com. I think I'd rather have it than iTunes. That's saying something.

just when I thought

Just when I thought everything that could be done has been done... Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 are coming out! Yet another chance to teleport my mind back to the free-gaming adolescent days of yore. Oh diablo and starcraft, how I love thee. The hours spent playing were only a "waste" to the un-enlightened. Please, God, hasten the day that these games are available to play.

http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3
http://www.starcraft2.com

n-able 6.5 training

Just a couple random text strings from N-able training on N-central 6.5

It's funny that I know how Smart Folders work from the Smart Playlist function of iTunes.

The hierarchy so far:
Dashboards contain folders contain devices. Confusing enough for you?