Work with people and IT architecture

Again, it has been a while. I've been really busy. Due to family reason, I'm leaving Schibsted to Capgemini. It is a senior position in Infrastructure Transform Services. I'll work with similar work as I am doing now, without operation responsible. More focus in designing and advising.

On architecture front recently, I've done work in the following area that I want to share in this blog. Infrastructure as big is usually bigger than anyone can master. Collaboration is crucial, but how to make your team , manager and economy stand behind same line?

This is what I am doing.

• listen carefully from everyone, about the reality from their point of view.
• draw a business picture with them, stand behind one common ground
• let everyone understand production first, security and risk are second (unless it is a security product)
• avoid use fancy/confusing words and phrases when communicate between groups. For example trunk means different thing for network team and code developer.
• learn basic economy, it is not only purchase of software and hardware, remember TCO, calculate RIO and nobody works free, those hours must counts!
• be humble, people will always overrun your intelligent. Learn from each other.

The tech I want to share is application monitoring. The end user only care about their application working. They don't care about it is a virtual server or placed in cloud. Five simple step to create application monitor.

1. What is service/app we want to monitor? What is real OLA/SLA?
2. Which control points must we monitor? How do we do it?
3. Who should get notifications and why?
4. Create documentation, how can first and second line deal with it?
5. Review security of monitoring and limitation