A. intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction

B. a strong liking or desire for or devotion to some activity, object, or concept

Life has been busy for me lately.  About a month ago I applied for a new job with my current employer.  This job would move me from my current technical role to a leadership role.  Not only would I be responsible for the direction of client technologies within the company but I would be responsible for a team of five people.  A very large shift for me personally and professionally.

A few weekends ago I volunteered at Milwaukee Irish Fest (http://www.irishfest.com/).  The crew I worked with was responsible for putting up all the signs and banners at the festival grounds.  At first blush this may seem to be a fairly simple task but I am here to tell you it requires a ton of work from some very dedicated volunteers.   It was a physically (and, at times, mentally) demanding five days.

I went immediately from that activity to a training/personal development seminar put on by my employer called ASCEND (Achieving Success through Compassion, Engagement, & Development).  This program has a number of facets including group dynamics, constructive feedback (how to give and receive), managing up, and “personal mastery”.  The personal mastery section contains things such as a 360 review (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-degree_feedback) and a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator).   It was a very intense four days.

One thing all of these activities have in common is passion.  The group of volunteers I worked with at Irish Fest put their all in to the setup.  Even when the days got long and the tempers got short you could see their smiles at the end of the day when they looked at what was accomplished.  It was a bit humbling to watch these people give there all for this thing.  How they feel about Irish Fest is the very definition of passion.  Similarly, as I’ve been going through the interview process for this new role within my company a bit of feedback I’ve received time and time again is that it is hard to see my passion.  Consensus seems to be that my head is in the right place, I’ve got the right ideas, I clearly am motivated to do good by myself and my team, but there was no sense of conviction, no sense of PASSION. A leader whose team cannot see his passion for leading will fail.

What became clear through my 360 review and my MBTI assessment is that I’m a very introverted, logically-minded sort of person (anyone who knows me in real life will be shocked by this, I’m sure).  Much of the time it appears that I don’t have a passion for anything or anyone just by the way I talk, how I conduct myself, and how I appear.  I’m not an arm-waving, shouting to the heavens, fire-and-brimstone kind of person.  The truth is, of course, that I am passionate about a lot of things in both my personal and professional life.  I just never felt that I had to show it in any way, especially professionally.  Why should other people need to care about what I’m passionate about as long as I get results?

The answer is obvious once I write it out like that.  People need to see my passion because that is how you lead.  That is how you inspire.  You don’t need to convince anyone you are passionate about a task if you are just going to do it yourself.  When you talk about leading a group or a team, however, it is crucial.

So – my next big challenge.  How do I show the passions I have and still stay “me”?  How can I show people that I care about them, or something I am working on without forcing myself to be something I’m not?  I haven’t figured it out yet, but I think I’ve accomplished the first step – determining that this needs to be addressed.

One final note – I don’t consider this to be a character flaw in any way.  I consider it to be a learning experience.  My personality traits dictate that I need to change the way I work when it comes to leading groups and teams.

As the Operations Manager project I’ve been writing about has been moving along rather slowly I thought I would take the time to write about a completely different topic.

In January of this year I set some goals for myself around health and fitness.  They are:

• Get down to 190 lbs (would require losing about 20 – 25 lbs)
• Get to a 38-in waist (lose 6 inches or so)
• Finish Al’s Run in 45 minutes or less (a personal record – this would be about 5 minutes less than my last PR) – http://www.alsrun.com/home.htm

As I just wrote those down I realized again that they are pretty tough goals.  Now that the year is more than half over I thought I would reflect on how far I’ve come (or not) and where I still need to go.

I started off the year with the ambition not just to get back in to shape, but to get in to the best shape of my life.  I knew this would require changing a lot of habits: eating, drinking, and exercising being the three obvious ones.  Over the last half-year I’ve had lots of struggles but also lots of successes.  Two things I’m proud of:

• Participating in a 3-day “hard-style kettlebell” weekend at TNT Performance http://www.tntperformancetraining.com/.  8 workouts in 3 days – intense.  This shot my metabolism through the roof and got me past my first weight-loss plateau

• Following a 21-day diet/cleanse plan.  This helped me branch out and try different foods that I didn’t eat on a regular basis.  Due to this plan I now eat 5/6 smaller meals per day instead of 2 or 3 giant meals.  I also eat a much healthier breakfast (eggs + veggies) rather than my normal bowl of cereal.

As for my struggles… well,  for the first few months when I would mess up – maybe I ate too much for dinner one night, or had too much to drink, or slept in instead of going for that run – I would get very down on myself.  What I’ve realized recently is that I could apply the methodology I use for projects at work to my personal life as well.  I approach projects with an iterative mind-set.  I don’t expect to get everything right on the first try.  I know that I’ll have to go back around and fix the little errors that squeaked through, or write that documentation that I missed, or train that user group.  Whatever it is, I know that I’ll be going back through this thing a few times over before I’m satisfied.

How can I apply that to my health and fitness?  I no longer feel horrible if I mess up on a meal or a workout.  I care, of course.  I know I shouldn’t have messed up.  But I don’t let that bring me down.  I know that I am committed to losing the weight and getting in the best shape of my life.  Over time the habits will become more ingrained in me and I will mess up less and less.  If I look back on the last 6 months I can see it happening already.  And that means the next 6 months will be even better.

Realistically, I’m starting to suspect that I may not hit all of my goals for this year.  But, that’s okay.  If I come out of this year with nothing else except for a determination to keep doing what I’m doing and to get better at it day after day, month after month, year after year, then that is just fine by me.

Hey all (five of you),

I’m back!  It took me a day and a half to dig myself out of the backlog of issues from my week in training which wasn’t as bad as I expected.  Luckily I was able to keep up with email and a few tasks while I was out… but more on that in a second.

Last week I attended “Installing and Configuring Microsoft Operations Manager 2007″.  http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/course.aspx?ID=50028B.  To my surprise the class had been updated for 2007 R2, which was great.  Unfortunately, I was the only member of the class.  I pretty much suspected that would be the case but I was still disappointed.  One of my goals was to make some contacts with people who either are planning to implement SCOM or already using it.  That was a bust.

The content itself wasn’t too bad.  I’d give the class/lab materials an 8/10 – one of the better I’ve seen.  The instructor was also fairly knowledgeable although it was pretty obvious he had no real-world experience implementing SCOM.  Again, that is pretty much what I expected.

So, was it worth my time?  I think so.  It gave me an opportunity to get my hands on SCOM and try a few things out.  I learned a few interesting tidbits about Active Directory integration for agent installs, different monitoring scenarios, and some other things that I may not have caught otherwise.  It was also a pretty light week for me.  I was done by 2PM every day and didn’t even have to go in on the last day.  When you are the only student in the class and you’ve already read up on the product a whole bunch… that tends to happen.  That was why I was able to keep up on emails and tasks for work even though I was out.

Now I’m really anxious to get started on this project.  Our plan is complete, but the project still needs to be officially “approved”.  I know – that is a very backwards way to run a project but that is pretty typical around here.  Speaking of which, I think I’m going to post this now and go bother some people to get that ball rolling!

Just a quick update here.  I go to SCOM training next week – specifically “Installing and Configuring Microsoft Operations Manager 2007″.  http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/course.aspx?ID=50028B.  It should be a great time – and it is only a 10-minute walk from my house which is a nice change of pace.  Although, I really hope I don’t end up being the only person in class or have more knowledge on this product then the teacher.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working with the project team on our project plan.  We are pretty much finished with the first draft/estimate and this is looking like a 6-month long project.  Unfortunately the server engineer on the project has a lot of other priorities so she can’t dedicate as much time to this as we would like.  Ah well, at least we actually have an official project, right?

I plan on posting a more detailed look at our project plan when it has firmed up a bit more.  I’m going to be very curious to see how well the effort estimates we put in there match with reality…

See everyone in a week!

Last week I attended the SCOM 2007 R2 “upgrade” project kick-0ff meeting (upgrade is in quotes because we will likely be starting fresh – more on that later).  There were four of us – the project manager, the systems engineer, the primary business-side stakeholder, and me – the primary Operations Manager admin.  I walked out of that meeting feeling very optimistic.  Some of the key reasons:

• Everyone is excited to be working on the project (and we all think it is long overdue!)
• We have a kick-ass project team – competent, intelligent, and a history of working well together
• We actually have a project manager!  This is relatively new for Infrastructure/Operations projects at my company.  Project Management has historically been only for the larger custom software applications we build.  This can only help us keep organized and on-target
• The primary stakeholder at the meeting made it very clear that this project should be run with the focus on quality, not schedule.  The reality is that we have a monitoring environment that works today.  It may be old and somewhat rickety but that is no reason to rush in to this.  Let’s take the time and do it right.  That was very refreshing to hear!

Coming out of that meeting we have a bunch of planning sessions scheduled over the next few weeks.  I go to Operations Manager training at the end of May for a week and we want to have a good list of questions for the class by then.  I’ve also been reading “Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 Unleashed” which I have been very impressed with thus far. I’ve made it through the theory and installation sections and I am about to start on the good stuff – how to actually use the beast!

As you can tell – so far, so good.  Let’s keep it going!!

In my last post I gave some of my background.  Now I’d like to talk a little bit about the monitoring environment I work with.  In 2006 we replaced our existing server monitoring solution with Microsoft Operations Manager 2005.   Important note: You should understand that I wasn’t involved with the original rollout of MOM 2005.  I was a member of the server team at the time so I was aware the project was going on but that was about the extent of it.  Thus, many of my comments below are based off of conversations with my peers and my observations over the last few years.

MOM 2005 was my company’s first true enterprise-level monitoring solution.  Prior to this we had a hodge-podge of various applications and scripts that were put together by the server team.  They worked fairly well but were a pain to manage.  With MOM 2005 we were given the opportunity to standardize our server monitoring around one product.  It was seen by some as the holy grail of monitoring – once MOM 2005 was in place we would know exactly what was happening in our environment and would be able to respond to issues quickly and confidently.  The ability to have management packs tuned to certain applications such as SQL server, Exchange, IIS, etc was unheard of.   When MOM was turned on and the old solutions turned off everything seemed great – at first.

I give a lot of credit to the implementation team – they worked their butts off to get MOM 2005 deployed to every server, did their due diligence with the basic management packs (Windows OS, HP Hardware, Clustering, etc), and immediately moved some of our more problematic scripts in to a custom management pack.   Unfortunately, as time went on the care-and-feeding of the MOM environment dropped off the radar.  There were many reasons for this: different schools of thought on who should “own” the environment, organizational change and shifting priorities moved the implementation team on to bigger and better things, unclear procedures on how to create new MOM alerts or tweak existing MOM alerts, and others.

When I stepped in the my current role more than a year ago our MOM environment was a mess.  MOM alerts were largely ignored.  The MOM console was only used to resolve alerts on a daily basis to “see which ones came back”.  New management packs were infrequently deployed, if at all.  I spent the first year tweaking alerts, re-training our operations team on how to properly use the MOM console, moving some more legacy monitoring in to MOM… basically just trying to get our environment in to better shape overall.  I like to think I did a decent job – but it was all with an eye on the future.  I knew from the beginning that our environment was getting long in the tooth and that SCOM 2007 was right around the corner.

It ended up taking a bit longer than I would have liked but we now have a project scheduled to upgrade MOM 2005 to SCOM 2007 R2.  Posts from here on out will be focused more on the actual project and progress being made.  It will be everything from the project “vision and scope” approval process to the actual implementation.  Stay tuned – it gets exciting from here, I promise!

Welcome, denizens of the Internet, to my blog!  This is my very first post ever, so please be gentle.  I’ve known that I wanted to start a blog for awhile now but it took me a bit of time to decide what to write about.  After discussing with various friends and coworkers I decided that I would use this blog as an opportunity to document and discuss my experiences as a member of a Network Operations Center (NOC) team with emphasis on alerting and monitoring – specifically Microsoft Operations Manager and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.   If that isn’t your cup of tea I apologize but feel free to stick around anyways – you never know when I might decide to write about something random.  :)

With that said, I’d like to give you a little background on yours truly.  I work for a healthcare company in the Midwest that employs approximately 1000 people.  I’ve been with the company for nine years and in that time have held a variety of positions: help-desk, system administration, network engineer, server/systems engineer, and storage engineer.  For the last year or so I’ve been a part of the Network Operations Center team as a Senior Problem Management Analyst.  The NOC team here is loosely based around the ITIL framework – you can get an idea of what the Problem Management position is supposed to do here: http://www.infra-corp.com/itil/ITIL-problem-management.asp

To make a long story (somewhat) short I’ll cut to the chase: a big part of my job on the NOC team is managing the alerting and monitoring of our server infrastructure.  I keep a close eye on every alert that comes in to our tier 1 support team regardless if it is resolved immediately or needs to be escalated to tier 2.  I turn off alerts that aren’t important, tweak thresholds for those that are too noisy, and find trends in alerts to identify root causes.

A few years ago we made the investment in Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 as our primary server monitoring tool.   This means  I’ve spent the last year getting to know the inner-working on MOM 2005 and tweaking it so our environment is as good as can be.  On April 29, 2010 we will be kicking off the project to upgrade to Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.

Ok, I feel like I’m starting to ramble a bit so I’m going to stop here.  In my next post I’ll give more info on our current environment and what the (near) future holds.  Stay tuned!