Archive for the ‘Misc’ Category
Achieving IT Service Quality: The Temptation of Band-Aids
Our BlogTalk Radio show guests Chris Oleson, Mike Hagan, and Christophe DeMoss has given me permission to reprint this excerpt from their book: Achieving IT Service Quality – The Opposite of Luck.
Perhaps after reading this brief section that I found so “right on” in my own IT work with clients, you might see why I’ve been talking up this book! You can download a chapter and connect with Chris, Mike, and Christophe at their blog: ooluck.com
The Temptation of Band-Aids
The memory leak example is a good one to continue with to discuss something very important: avoiding long-term use of Band-Aids. In order to survive, organizations that are unable, unwilling, or just don’t know how to get to true root cause will inevitably resort to Band-Aids as a way of getting by.
We were once brought in to help a particularly troubled sales application where a memory leak bug caused a server to run out of memory in the middle of a particularly critical production day. When we pushed for root cause, we were told the cause of the failure had been human error. This seemed quite possible to us. We began to wonder where the human error had been made. Was it during the testing process that allowed the bug to make it into production? Was the human error during the coding process that created the bug in the first place? We were eager to hear where the human error had occurred so the root cause could be addressed.
Imagine our surprise when we were told the root cause was an administrator having inadvertently disabled a cron11 job to automatically reboot the server every night to clear the memory that was being consumed by the memory leak. You see, the memory leak was a known problem for more than a year, and somewhere along the line someone had decided that doing an automated nightly bounce of the server was the right permanent solution. In the mind of the manager performing the root cause investigation, the problem had been solved by the nightly auto-restart, and the mistake occurred when the administrator inadvertently turned off the job that kicked off the reboot. Clearly, we had different ideas than the manager about what root cause actually means. He had stopped several whys short instead of looking deeper.
In this particular case, a Band-Aid had been mistaken for the root cause corrective action. Instead of fixing the code bug causing the memory leak (and fixing the process that allowed the code bug to make it into production), the decision was consciously made to just apply the Band-Aid. This prevented reoccurrence, but also masked the root problem. To be sure, writing a bounce script is a lot easier than diagnosing and fixing a memory bug, and is a valid intermediate step to take in case the leak takes a few weeks to fix, test, and deploy, but the easy way out continues to put you at risk over the long term. The root problem continued to lurk in the environment until, just like The Ostrich Postulate says it will, it reoccurred at an even more inopportune time. Had the root problem been fixed when first identified a year earlier, the repeat outage could have been prevented.
And on top of all of that, it turns out that increases in processing volumes had caused memory use on the server to grow, so the leak effectively became larger. Since running out of memory on the server causes an incident, the nightly bounce would have only worked for a few more weeks before it would not have had enough, memory would be consumed by midday, and daily outages would have begun to occur. This is a classic example of The Ostrich Postulate in action.
[End of Excerpt]
I’m sure you can see how down to earth and plainly written this book is. This is why I highly recommend it to anyone involved in IT or who has to deal with performance issues in the workplace at all. Whether you work for a big enterprise or are a small IT company, the practical advice in this book is invaluable! Even those involved with building reports and metrics for the IT division will find this invaluable!
I have no reason – no monetary compensation other than perhaps an Amazon affiliate payment if you buy through my site – to promote this book. It was given to me free prior to the guests being on my show, but I’m telling you, I CANNOT put it down!
I am sharing this with you because I think YOU – my readers – can benefit from this book. This is a MUST READ! It has been an enormous help to me already in my work!
11 Cron: A feature in UNIX systems (which stands for “command run on”) that allows commands or scripts to run automatically at a scheduled time.
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Happy New Year!
Just wanted to take this opportunity to wish all our readers a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year!
Also wanted to make a quick mention that if this blog looks a bit bigger it’s not your eyes playing tricks on you! It is wider! Just part of our new look for the new year!
I hope this makes it easier to read! More coming……. stay tuned!
Debbie
Our Black Friday Weekend Special!
EXTENDED 1 MORE DAY BY REQUEST FOR CYBER MONDAY!
First, I’d like to share my Holiday greeting to you!
I hope you enjoyed my Holiday Greeting! That was done with JibJab in conjunction with Office Max, and I purchased it to share with you!
That being said, I have a special offer for this weekend only – today – Black Friday – November 27, 2009 through Sunday, November 29,2009 Monday, November 30, 2009 at 11:59 PM. Although this is a blog post and remains in the archives, this offer will expire at midnight Sunday Monday! I will not be able to honor requests made after that time.
I will perform the following service FREE as long you use the link that follows this blog post to sign up for LunarPages web hosting service.
TIIM* Disclosure: This is my affiliate link and I earn $65 if you sign up using this link. This compensates me partially for what I will do for you.
Here are the services that I will provide under this offer FREE:
- Move an existing (see restrictions below) blog or website from your current web hosting account to your new LunarPages account. So if you’ve ever wanted to get on a secure and awesome web host now is your chance to make the move effortless!
- Move an existing hosted blog (see restrictions below) from Blogger, Wordpress.com, or others, to your own self-hosted blog that I’ll set-up for you on your new LunarPages account. And no, you will not lose any of your blog posts that you posted before. This includes getting you setup with all the necessary plug-ins and widgets that you need to not only protect you but enable you to connect to your social networks.
- Create a brand new WordPress blog for you on your new LunarPages web hosting account (see restrictions below). And if you’re new to blogging, I will provide you support for up to 3 months to help you get started! This includes getting you setup with all the necessary plug-ins and widgets that you need to not only protect you but enable you to connect to your social networks.
Restrictions:
The website cannot have any scripts, auto-responders, or other software running like Joomla or Drupal. This move would require a lot of additional setup and potential complications that cannot be included in this offer.
If you are not sure what’s running on your website, use our Contact Page to contact me and give me the URL of your website in the message section and I’ll check it out and let you know if it’s doable. But the request must be made before midnight on Sunday, November 29, 2009 Monday, November 30, 2009!
If you are moving an entire blog from another host or a blogging site like Blogger, or WordPress, there cannot be more than 1,000 blog posts to move.
Your Part:
I will need access to your current host BEFORE you move the domain to the new name servers so I can get your website or blog downloaded for the move unless you already have a full back-up copy of the files yourself.
For blogs, I would like to do the back-up myself to insure I can transfer them properly. (I’ve done this before and my method works. See: our Creative page or read the testimonial below.)
If you are new to this or unsure of any of what I’m saying, use our contact page to have me take a look at your site or blog BEFORE you sign up with LunarPages. I will honor any outstanding inquiries made during this offer. But you must at least put in an inquiry! There is not cost for me to look at your site!
And of course, this comes with our guarantee that you will be satisfied!
Start the New Year with a secure, reliable web host!
Remember, all you pay for is the web hosting service when you sign up – which is also ridiculously inexpensive – I’ll do the move free (applicable the restrictions listed above).
And you just never know what might happen! You may discover what Michelle from Accurate Process discovered when we moved their site and did a redesign! They were suddenly listed in the search engines, getting traffic, AND that was before we even finished our magic! It just might happen to you!
So, if you do nothing else this weekend, at least submit an inquiry on our contact page to preserve this offer!
If you’re ready to make the move, click the image below – it contains our affiliate link so we get credit.
Happy Holidays!
Debbie
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