On Thu, Feb 08, 2007 at 08:01:08AM -0500, Scott Walters wrote:
Henrik,
I am so sorry to hear about your situation. I hope sanity will reign in the end. Here are some of my suggestions:
<big snip>
Thanks - I appreciate your comments, and they do match up pretty well with my own thoughts about how to tackle this.
I'm not particularly worried about it. This issue has been there ever since we started using BB almost 6 years ago. The only reason why it's on the agenda now is that I have a new boss who has decided that we should get this issue resolved once and for all - he will not accept that Hobbit has this "second class" status in our NOC.
And yes - this is all about politics. The Unicenter group is also the group responsible for manning our NOC - and given that it takes about 20 people to run Unicenter here versus 0.5 (me) to run Hobbit, they are somewhat reluctant to embrace it.
(The 0.5 is only for running Hobbit - developing Hobbit is another issue, but that happens mostly in my spare time).
You will lose the PHB vs. technician fight based solely on "features."
The only reason Hobbit exists is that I secured the support of some fairly high-up people as well as a lot of customer-contact people (and external customers, even) right from the start. When two of our top-3 customers insist on having access to Hobbit as a requirement for renewing their contracts, I have a pretty strong case.
When I do use the "feature" argument, I know I have to focus on the features that bosses understand. There are lots of neat tech stuff in Hobbit, but that doesn't sell Hobbit - the abundance of graphs and (SLA) reports do, as well as the positive feedback the boss gets from our customers.
- Be prepared to accept using both tools is fine.
That is what we've been doing so far. I've always insisted that the thing we can monitor with TNG *will* be monitored by TNG - e.g. we never put "disk" alerts on the Hobbit critical-systems view, because those are supposed to be handled by TNG. (Whether TNG actually detects the problem then is another matter entirely).
- Anticipate the issues the PHB will "throw at you." Sure hobbit is great, but what if you leave Henrik? No one else in the company/world knows hobbit like you, that creates risk to the organization.
This was/is a major reason for releasing Hobbit as Open Source. I frequentely point out how many people are downloading Hobbit, and the amount of traffic on the mailing list to show that it's "not just me in my basement". The list of companies using Hobbit that was put together last year is useful. And just a couple of days ago I received a mail from IBM, where they asked for permission to include some Hobbit documentation into one of their z/VM guides - this will also be handy to show that Hobbit is more than just my personal project.
For the sake of the entire hobbit community, good luck!
Thanks, I'll let you know how it works out.
Regards, Henrik