Visualizing Workloads With Powershell, MariaDB, and Grafana: ESXi Performance

In the world of systems, trending performance data in a way that can tell you how your workload is doing can be pretty valuable. Like many employers mine has dealt with lockdowns due to COVID, but as an essential business we’ve greatly increased the number of users we have working from home on our vmWare […]

Building Dashboards in Solarwinds Orion: Network Charts

In the first part of this series on building Solarwinds Orion dashboards I detailed how to build an effective home page showing some of the valuable info coming into the monitoring system. In this long awaited next part, I’ll show a page view with charts and some other data for network interfaces and devices in […]

Building Dashboards in Solarwinds Orion: An Effective Home Page

Solarwinds NPM is an excellent monitoring system with many different modules that do just about everything. As a long time user of the platform, I’ve spent years designing and coming up with new ways to build good dashboards. In this post, I’ll go over how to create some dashboards on the home page that shows […]

vmWare CPU Ready Reports With Powershell and MariaDB

I recently needed to get VM CPU ready times across four different vCenter clusters. Based on code in the vmWare forums and a couple of excellent KB articles, I created a script that queries them and writes the results to a MariaDB database. The Powershell script runs as a task every 15 minutes and takes […]

IT Achievements! Unlock Them All!

Areola Bold Find a hidden porn collection in the fonts folder. Voices From Beyond The Grave Have a user call or email you because their password doesn’t work. Because they’ve been fired and not told yet. Arise, Serpentor, Arise! Recover data from non backup sources Blindly Forward! Successfully solve an issue on a production system […]

The SRM Dilemma

Storage resource management software is typically used to gain insight into disparate storage systems and SANs, and provide a bit of intelligence on the growth and health of storage across the enterprise. There are a number of them on the market, both open source and commercial, and they range from great to horrible. Many also […]

The UltraDNS API and Powershell Pt. 2

In a previous post, I outlined using Powershell to work with the UltraDNS API. Here is an update with a screen shot of the GUI. As part of this project, I implemented a web front end that allows anyone on my team to trigger a DNS failover by domain, client, or datacenter. This web front […]

The UltraDNS API and Powershell

At work we’re currently using Neustar’s UltraDNS service to host 200+ DNS records, and I started a project to automate changing IP addresses to switch to DR sites. There is a well documented API for this, with great examples and solutions built mostly on Python, Perl, and Java. UltraDNS has published examples for all three of […]

Inward Turn

In the wake of the attack on Sony Pictures in the U.S., many are trying to validate the government’s claim that it was a hack perpetuated by North Korea. If this is true it is the first highly public incident involving state-sponsored cyber espionage, and there will likely be more in the future. The incident […]