I've joined Etelos. Three infrastructure tools that made my first week easier...

I'm happy to announce that I've joined Etelos as its Director of Infrastructure. Etelos is refreshingly supportive of my participation here and in Velocity, which is one of the many reasons I joined. The company didn't ask for (and doesn't have) control or influence over my contributions here. I'm responsible for what I say.

Thoughts on Infrastructure & Corporate IT:

In my first few hours on the job I made a valiant and futile attempt to "not own Corporate IT". In hindsight, my advice to anyone that has an opportunity to take over Corporate IT is to do it. It's probably the area causing the most pain and lost productivity in an organization. Nobody cares about horizontal partitioning and geo-distribution if they can't get on to the network and there are 10 new hires waiting for laptops and email.

More importantly, you can ensure that people have tools that are minimally intrusive and maximally rockstar-enabling. Corporate IT that doesn't suck turns out to be Operations Secret-Sauce too.

The three tools that made my first week much easier:

• Apple Remote Desktop - Most Etelos employees use Macs (and I plan to keep it that way). I bought Apple Remote Desktop last week and found that the asset management & inventory tools alone are worth $499. My only complaint is that it doesn't work for remote users without a VPN. (Note to Apple: You need to offer a full-function trial. Also, if you gave it away for free you would sell more Macs to corporate customers.)
• Webmetrics - I started evaluating Webmetrics for site and transaction monitoring have been very impressed despite its "clunky" configuration UI. It has a 30 day full-function trial for most services. The company is also building public dashboards for service providers like this one:
• Hyperic HQ - This is the first time I've deployed Hyperic systems monitoring in a heterogeneous production environment. Hyperic's auto-discovery worked like magic... even detecting and pulling in legacy Nagios monitoring. Unfortunately the agent requires an open port which is a security problem and requires a lot of tedious firewall configuration. It sounds like this is something that they will be fixing soon.

It's been 5 years since I last managed SSL certificates, and it's still a comedically irritating process. Are there any resources that I should know about? (Hint: I think this would a great talk for Velocity and the CFP is still open.)

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