I was in a meeting today where we were discussing some features within our products that aren't necessarily apparent to the average user. These are the types of features that you usually don't find out about until you've used the product for quite a while, gotten some tips from the experts, or attended a training class. I really like these types of features. I mean, when I've been using a product for a while and I stumble up on a cool new feature I feel like just won something. I stumbled upon a new feature in Firefox the other day and as a matter of fact Joel showed me a nifty trick for using the Windows command prompt just yesterday and in both cases it was like getting an unexpected bonus. Ease of use is important, but I also like it when when a product offers me the ability to increase my productivity by learning more about the product. Maybe I just like knowing things that other people don't know, but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I like being an expert and I like using products that allow me to become one.
I'd like to know your opinions on this... Drop me a comment if you have some time.
Now to pay the bills...Speaking of "hidden" features, you may not realize this but you can add SLAs on to the interfaces that you're managing in Orion. This can come in really handy, especially if you're manging your circuit providers to SLAs for performance or availability. I use it to draw SLA lines on my bandwidth utilization charts to represent CIR on frame-relay circuits. This is covered in the docs, but basically you'll want to use the Custom Property Editor to add an "SLA" column to your node and/or interface tables and then enter in the respective vales for the objects in those tables.
Flame on...Josh
Hey Josh, speaking of Firefox, have you tried the FireBug plugin?
It's great for troubleshooting web sites & page problems.
Here's a quick snap of the network stats for this web page:
thwack.com/.../JoshsBlog.jpg
There are more details & a link to the plugin here:
thwack.com/.../18946.aspx
Network_Guru,
Yes, I use Firebug quite a bit. Great tool. Have you also seen the DNS add-on from DNSStuff.com?
Josh
We're just starting to look at putting together monthly KPI's for our Trust board and visually it's great being able to add in our case availability targets rather than SLA's.
Another one we are currently looking at is change control, we have config management with Cirrus but it might be an idea to look at adding a change control function for Cirrus, rather than what we currently are looking at is writing our own Access DB to log required and emergency changes and then making those change active in Cirrus.
Jon