We tell you with lots of humor why monitoring your equipment is no laughing matter

Let’s face it, enough chit chat, without monitoring, your computer walks on a tightrope, 30 floors high and without safety net: a false movement and BAM! It’s over! Brains omelette for the pigeons of your neighborhood!

Therefore, today, in the sacred and glaucous Pandora FMS blog, we bring you a series of testimonies, of real cases, sent by our esteemed users, where we ask them to tell us their miseries in exchange for taking the only moral possible:

Monitoring your computers is extremely important

Ramontxu Ortega, Software Engineer: “It’s like a glass of juice for your servers”

“I am the father of a small kid. His name is Antonio. I know him, quite a bit I would say, and under no circumstances would I give him a glass of juice without a lid and hope that everything goes well.

I once did. I trusted him. Big mistake. He accidentally spilled all the juice on my collection of origami figures based on the characters played by Bernard Hill. (Titanic, The Scorpion King, Lord of the Rings, The Kid…)

Well, just as I can’t trust my son, you can’t operate your servers without monitoring software.

Monitoring software is that snap lid that will make your figurines not end up soaked. I can forgive Antonio. He’s 11 years old and has balance issues, but performance issues from not using monitoring software are inexcusable.”

Jackie Breslin, Quality Assurance Engineer: “It’s like going to the dentist. More or less”

“My old dentist was named John, John I don’t know what else.

He had a small dental clinic outside Chippewa Falls. John had the most cutting edge equipment and believed his equipment was in good working order.

However, one day, while a patient (ME) was in the middle of an endodontic procedure, the dental drill suddenly stopped working. John was forced to give a tremendous outcry of outrage that frightened both the patient (ME) and half Chippewa Falls.

He interrupted the process of course and changed the poor patient’s appointment for another day, prompting frustration and hatred from both the patient and staff.

What I mean to say with all this useless stuff is that you have to ALWAYS follow up the use and performance of your computers.

Imagine that John’s inoperative had some kind of magic software that would detect problems in his drills before they got stuck in the teeth of his clients.

Good monitoring software is key to maintaining the health and longevity of your equipment.

Invest in monitoring software. Prevent failures. Ensure proper performance.

I mean… don’t be like John.”

Mauricio Núñez, DevOps Engineer and CEO: “Maybe it’s like checking the weather”

“There we were, like a good tech company that had just launched its first product. Excited about the product and confident that everything was working properly. There was no need to put more money into monitoring. Maybe later on…

One morning, two or three days after starting up, I decided to check the company’s website from my phone. Nothing, it was down. Completely. Panicked, I called my team to find out what was going on. It had fallen due to a sudden traffic increase. We didn’t expect such a thing.

I had to check the time before I left home, so to speak.

After all, just as sunscreen protects you from burns, monitoring software protects your equipment from unexpected drops from traffic spikes.

What an analogy, right?

I can do it with the rain too: if I had looked at the weather, I would have known that I had to carry an umbrella (or, in this case, a monitoring software) to protect the startup from unexpected rain (or, in this case, from traffic spikes).

I should have devoted myself to writing.”

Julia Salas, Professional Marketing: “It’s like playing hide and seek”

“Once, as a child, playing hide-and-seek with friends in the dark, I got scared the shit out of me. Literally. I was always afraid of the dark, what I did not know is that it got way worse when it was my turn to seek when playing hide and seek.

That day I closed my eyes, counted to ten and began to look for everyone in that abandoned house.

I did it terribly wrong, every time I was going to reveal someone I was paralyzed by fear. People noticed and decided to give me a break.

Except for Sara. Sara found the perfect hiding place.

She went into a two-door closet in the basement. We looked for her everywhere. Obviously no one was going to open that nineteenth-century closet. We even called her on the phone when we got tired. She had turned it off.

Anxiety got to me and I had to go do my business in the surrounding countryside.

Now I work with software-monitored surveillance programs that would have found Sara in no time.

Monitoring software is good for more things. Spotting security threats, detecting hardware failures, good use of resources… I would only use it to find something you didn’t know was there. Like damned Sara, who came out of her hideout hours after, dust-covered and with a smile on her face.”

Would you like to find out more about monitoring software?