The 3 Coolest Things Built By Bugs

ITILV3 - Day 30

Good Practices

ITIL is a Good Practice Framework for IT Service Management - it provides advice and best practices for the management of IT services.

Good Practices are best practices that work, are effective and have gained wide acceptance.

ITIL is successful because it provides value to both the business and the customer through its focus on service, value, and continual improvement of IT services.

In my opinion this explanation about good practices is completely unnecessary. The name is self explanatory.

ITILV3 - Day 29

Financial Management for IT Services

Three main activities:

1 - Budgeting

2 - Accounting

3 - Charging

Financial Management applies to all three service provider types:

1 - An internal service provider within a business unit

2 - An internal service provider that provides shared IT services to multiple units.

3 - An external service provider.

Well, according to ITIL budgeting, accouting and chargin are IT responsabilities. It means IT, when it comes to money, manages itself. Is that so?

Change Column Name - SQLServer/MySQL

I don't know about you, but I always forget the correct syntax to change column name.

SQLServer
sp_rename 'FileEstimation.email', 'Login', 'COLUMN';

The result
Caution: Changing any part of an object name could break scripts and stored procedures.

MySQL
alter table FileEstimation change email login varchar (100) ;

Now Oracle is in the house, but I think the syntax hasn't change for mysql.

ITILV3 - Day 28

Facilities Management

The Facilities Management function manages the physical environment of the IT infraestructure and data centers.

Facilities Management activities:

1 - Building Management (What is this?)
2 - Equipment (IT, cooling, power)
3 - Power Management
4 - Physical environment monitoring (How is this done? Is this an automated tool or a person that monitors?)
5 - Physical access control
6 - Recovery sites (What is this? Isn't it physical? Areyou talking about redundance?)

ITILV3 - Day 27

Event Management activities:

1 - Event monitoring and detection
2 - Event notification and logging
3 - Event correlation.
4 - Event categorization

The Event Management process is responsible for setting performance thresholds and then monitoring the service to detect when the performance does not meet the threshold.

I understand the expression "performance thresholds", but I have doubts about cost benefit relation. How complex is to manage events with that point of view? Correlation? Let me tell you something. To manage correlation between events it's not easy task at all. I think this topic is very sophisticated one and, at the same time, one of the most difficult to implement.

Have you ever thoght about ALM?

First of all ALM stands for APPLICATION LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT.
There are some (not many) softwares that will help you to implement ALM in your company.
But there's one wich I consider one of the most handy ones, CRUISE CONTROL .NET, or CCNET, as it is known.

But what exactly do we do with CCNET? Build applications, that's what CCNET is for. Just that? No.
You can organize, schedule and decide when to build the application (but when I say "you", I mean the CCNET). What you accomplish with CCNET is the automation of your builds, that's it.
Do you wanna an example?

Here it is:

http://build.nauck-it.de/ViewFarmReport.aspx 

Is it difficult to install and implement? Not really. Maybe, in the near future, I'll write a tutorial explaining step by step how to setup CCNET.


You can find more details about the applicaiton here
http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/

Download
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ccnet/






Is it the best solution when it comes to ALM? No. But it's free! And it's a pretty honest application.
I have been using CCNET for years and it never let me down.
If you are short of money and you need a decent ALM software, CCNET is your best choice.
See you!

ITILV3 - Day 26

Event

An Event is any significant change to an IT service or configuration item (CI).

Three categories of Events:

1 - Information - no action required.

2 - Warning - something is close to a pre-set performance threshold.

3 - Exception - something has exceeded a threshold and needs intervention.

The question is: information for who? warning for who? exception for who?
I understand the meaning of those three items. But I think it is too much theoretical.

NERD

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A nerd (adjective: nerdy) is a person, typically described as being overly intellectual, obsessive, or socially impaired. They may spend inordinate amounts of time on unpopular, obscure, or non-mainstream activities, which are generally either highly technical or relating to topics of fiction or fantasy, to the exclusion of more mainstream activities.[1][2][3] Additionally, many nerds are described as being shy, quirky, and unattractive,[4] and may have difficulty participating in, or even following, sports. "Nerd" is a derogatory, stereotypical term, but as with other pejoratives, it has been reclaimed and redefined by some as a term of pride and group identity.