Translation: Favorite tools by technicians to increase IT staff productivity



    Each year, Network World asks IT professionals to name their favorite work tools they use every day. This year several interesting software products are presented on this list.

    ActivTrak The

    free employee productivity monitoring service impressed Jim Beck, the owner of Beck Tech Support, a technology support company for small businesses and consumers.

    “Our clients need the same support as large companies, but do not have their financial capabilities to afford such a service. We are working in this niche, ”says Beck. “We constantly monitor new tools and solutions and offer the best of them to our customers. Several customers liked ActivTrak, which allows you to unobtrusively control the work of employees. ”

    Thanks to ActivTrak , one of Beck's customers identified the employee who appropriated the customers. Another found that the lawyer was trying to illegally affect the amount of the dispute. And the film production company identified an assistant who "leaked" information about the script and the filming. “ActivTrak gives the employer control at an affordable price, or generally free of charge,” Beck says.

    AppDynamics

    Augusto Azarello, QA engineer at The Container Store, wrote about his preference for the AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform. This is a management platform designed to help companies see what is happening with the fleet of software used and take action if the poor performance of an application affects business processes.

    AppDynamics provides a glimpse into the infrastructure of production and test environments. It allows us to focus more effectively on performance and stability, notifying of issues that are noticed. Again and again, we are convinced of the strength of AppDynamics, not only as a production platform, but also in all development and testing processes, ”says Azarello. “The simple application of the notification system, the instant increase in our knowledge about the infrastructure and operation of applications, as well as the visual control panels for each type of audience, make it a complete solution."

    Azure

    Tod Kokoshka enthusiastically responds to Microsoft Azure. Kokoshka is vice president of technology at PI Worldwide, which helps enterprises make informed decisions about hiring, developing, and deploying staff. According to Kokoshka, Azure reduces PI Worldwide’s dependency on infrastructure staff, reduces the time it takes to service and configure new servers, and seamlessly integrates with NET development.

    “We are completely rebuilding our accessPI application, which we offer our customers to provide a behavioral analysis of employees, candidates and vacancies in the company,” says Kokoshka. "Azure gives us the opportunity to conduct continuous development, reducing the need for a consistent connection of various tools for creation, deployment and testing."

    Dynatrace

    Similarly, Jan Schwelens shared his impressions of managing applications with Dynatrace.

    “I especially like Dynatrace in that it gives a clear idea of ​​not only what is happening with our own application, but with the whole landscape of its installations. And besides, it shows what the client is watching at home (this is the ultimate goal of the commercial application - to satisfy the end user and increase its productivity), ”says Schlevens, software structure developer and member of the Sofico solution management team, which develops software for car rental, ship management and mobile operators.

    Sofico uses Dynatracefor three years. “Over this period of time, he helped us identify several problems with our applications that we could not have discovered in another way, for example: complex synchronization problems that slow down, and certain redundant SQL executions that unnecessarily overloaded the database,” - says Schwelens.

    FieldView Infrastructure Software

    Stuart Walker, Mentor Graphics' Enterprise Maintenance Manager, relies heavily on FieldView infrastructure software , which has been used for 5 years.

    “FieldView is a monitoring and reporting solution covering the IT and enterprise sectors; therefore, it’s easy to combine equipment from several manufacturers and several protocols with global access, ”says Walker. “We use it to monitor and notify our data centers and critical infrastructure around the world. With age, it only gets better. This tool gives me the opportunity to sleep peacefully at night, knowing that any problem will be identified and a notification has been sent. And in the afternoon, it helps us identify inefficiencies. ”

    PagerDuty

    For Wade Warren's favorite time-saving tool is PagerDuty, a service for collecting and sending alerts, which integrates into existing systems for monitoring the organization of the company's infrastructure, applications and networks.

    “PagerDuty allowed me to painlessly gather disparate employees located around the world into a close-knit team that can quickly respond to problems in our production environment, which serves a base of approximately 140 million users around the world,” says Warren, vice president of technical operations at wiki Hosting Wikia. “It integrates with all of our internal and external monitoring systems and provides a visual representation of the health of our infrastructure from an executive level, including all the details necessary for our technical staff to correctly understand the essence of the problem, which reduces repair time.”

    Qumulo

    Content is key to the work of Densho , an organization whose mission is to preserve evidence of Japanese Americans who were held in internment camps during World War II.

    “Previously, two-thirds of the infrastructure consisted of high-performance SAN equipment and high-capacity amateur NAS. SAN equipment was too expensive, difficult to manage, and could not be scaled. NAS equipment was unreliable, and its performance was not enough to cope with our workload, ”recalls Fro.

    Densho turned to startup Qumulowhose goal is to help enterprises more efficiently store data and more clearly monitor the use of content. Fro admired the scalability, easy manageability and integrated analytics of the Qumulo Core and Q0626 hybrid storage devices.

    “Q0626, built on the Qumulo Core software platform, has allowed us to combine all our data into a single point of control. Now we have the opportunity to gradually scale our drive to tens of petabytes without interrupting customer service, ”says Fro. Hybrid Flash / SSD / HDD equipment ensures reliable operation of the enterprise, and Qumulo is controlled through a simple web interface that provides incredibly easy administration and maintenance. A few hours that were spent monthly on maintenance and troubleshooting, now we can devote more productive work. "

    Built-in analytics really distinguishes Qumulo technology. Fro says: “We have the opportunity to quickly see not only the physical operation of the system, but also the data itself. Using the web-based user interface, I can see real-time usage by directories, by files and by clients, which allows me to analyze production trends and even diagnose problems with the progress of work and tools that were difficult to notice on the part of the user. In addition, all analytics is available through the REST interface, which makes it possible to use metadata in our own applications and create custom web visualizations. ”

    PernixData

    PernixData , which creates a memory hypervisor that virtualizes arrays of flash drives, has conquered Lucas McQuistian.

    “This is one of the few products that truly deliver on their promises,” said McQuistian, server operations manager for GIW Industries, a manufacturer of castings and machinery.

    “We paid attention to him because we planned to host Citrix and wanted to provide our customers with convenience no less than using a full computer,” says McQuistian. “PernixData FVP provided us with this by increasing I / O performance for virtual machines running on ESXi by using local solid-state memory on ESXi hosts and reducing I / O traffic to / from our SAN.”

    “The PernixData system turned out to be a truly hassle-free solution of great value to employees of small IT departments like ours.”

    “PernixData FVP makes an already good product - Vmware is even better,” adds Marcus Rufner, system administrator for Tecplot, a company that manufactures visualization tools for engineers and scientists.

    “Like most similar situations, mine required high-speed performance from our virtual machines. With PernixData, we have achieved a notable improvement in performance, with simple and easy-to-understand graphics, ”says Rufner. “Measuring the impact of latency on end users is always difficult. But having a large number of servers and rarely hearing complaints from end users about problems with speed is exactly the proof I needed. ”

    PRTG Network Monitor

    Rich Russo Dedicated Paessler Network PRTS Monitor. “This is an all-seeing eye that oversees the entire network,” says Rousseau, senior infrastructure engineer at Crystal & Company, an insurance and management advisory company.

    “We have a small IT department, so there are always enough problems. If we needed to additionally check the systems, for example, for free disk space, processor load or bandwidth peaks, we would not be able to do this, ”Rousseau says. “The PRTG easily tests more systems than we all together could test in a day. Combining this with the red flag notification email, we get the perfect tool. "We will find out about the problems before the users and may think about fixing them before they start calling us."

    Transfer. Original article:Tech pros' favorite tools increase IT efficiency

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