Maintanace Calander for IT Operations

Problem Statement:      Multiple maintenance(s)  gives us tough time towards our  availability ,  better manageability and eventually improper resource alignment. 

Trying to solve:    Better communication, better visibility.   With visibility rest will follow.

What we want to Solve:

1. Because emails aren't just letters anymore, they're tasks.. Specially in Operations.
2. YOU might have been in the original email BUT got missed in the calendar invite by maintenance driver
3. We need a ‘one stop’ view to see all the upcoming maintenances.
4. Easy to analyze (dis)agree/ postpone  these maintenances proposed by multiple team with this single view.
5. From top of Pyramid view - path from scarcity to visibility and which will facilitate and clarify us the  action part.

How:

Say you already have a kinetic calendar  OR  confluence cal and such…. where multiple teams lists their upcoming maintenance.  But it’s for various teams and looking at multiple places you need to derive your schedule.  Or else someone will have to maintain one of your own which will be nothing but parts/extracts from all those. So will have maintenance overhead.

We can have yet another  tool…  I almost started working on one and stopped by this idea  - 

1. Let’s have an outlook calendar  for EBS which is shared across all team members.
2. **Outlook  calendar which will have  “ONLY” maintenance listed.
3. Forget everyone BUT just add this email id in the calendar invite - maintanace@yourcompany.com
4. By default it will display with your calendar, OR   you can also Display on a floating TV Screen extended in your teams work area.

What we need:

We are proposing an email id which will give us a calendar also:  maintanace@yourcompany.com

We will  use  JUST  the calendar  part of this mailbox and all of us have a  shared view.

Security:

We will see if sending  email from this id can be restricted ,  if NOT possible we will put strict security disclaimer for this email id. I guess it is possible.

Everyone should have permission to have shared access that calendar.

Enforcement:

If someone is  calling a maintenance, AND any of your  entity is involved ( which attracts risk or needs your attention)  , please  just have this email id included in the calendar invite.  That’s it!! 

Even If someone missed,     one of us just can forward the invite so that it gets listed in the calendar.

Q & Comments:

How does it sound??  

  

-DK

Internet Outage Analyzer - Globally!!

If you have global traffic , Internet instability or outages on any particular region  can affect your Application. Also With the faster adoption of online way of doing things Complexity is the new reality current web and mobile applications. And hence - If a third party internet outage or issue occurs, your brand is the one that is affected. Recently I was surprised to see so many site down alert Gomez network. I was looking form some online report which gives me a hint whether there is any ongoing internet outage from where the Gomez nodes reported us these problems.  I had no choice but to use below some sites which gave me some stats about the internet instability on those areas:

http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz1.html
https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/explorer/
http://www.outageanalyzer.com/
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/
http://downdetector.com/archive/
http://www.gomezapm.com/group/guest/internet-health-map

http://www.internetpulse.net/

On another note , the Submarine Cable Map is a free resource from TeleGeography which gives an active and planned submarine cable systems and their landing stations.
http://www.submarinecablemap.com/

Hope this helps - and please don't forget to name some tools/sites that you have come across which helps the internet community worldwide or intends to notify about current ongoing outages or instability.

-DK

PS: Above is a snap from Akamai's Real-Time web monitor dashboard which is just intended to give a visual look on the topic for readers benifit. No copyright infringement  intended, also neither I  own these images nor I  take credit for any of those images.