In my sordid career, I have been an actor, bug exterminator and wild-animal remover (nothing crazy like pumas or wildebeasts. Just skunks and raccoons.), electrician, carpenter, stage-combat instructor, American Sign Language interpreter, and Sunday school teacher.

Oh, and I work with computers.

Since 1989 (when you got a free copy of Windows 286 on twelve 5¼” floppies when you bought a copy of Excel 1.0) I have worked as a classroom instructor, courseware designer, desktop support tech, server support engineer, and software distribution expert.

Then about 16 years ago I got involved with systems monitoring. I’ve worked with a wide range of tools: Tivoli, Nagios, Patrol, ZenOss, OpenView, SiteScope, SolarWinds, and of course New Relic. I’ve designed solutions for companies that ranged in size from extremely modest (~10 systems) to ludicrous large (250,000 systems in 5,000 locations). During that time, I’ve had to chance to learn about monitoring all types of systems – routers, switches, load-balancers, and SAN fabric as well as windows, linux, and unix servers running on physical and virtual platforms.