Dammit Wednesday: Systems Consistency

Working in the IT industry means constant updates and changes. One of the hassles at my job comes with the various worksheets, paperwork, emails and diagrams on how the systems are supposed to be set up can fall out of date near instantly.

An example of this is the worksheet that goes with connectivity diagnostics targets. We run a software application called PingPlotter in all of our cable systems along with a handful of other servers and workstations. PingPlotter is a very simple yet extremely powerful application that has quickly become a 1st response to common network troubleshooting. It simply pings a target over and over and graphs the connectivity, but there’s more to it than just the pinging itself. Everything in the software is customizable, I’m talking detailed specifications down to the packet size, the response time, time between tests, loss thresholds, Jitter, it’s essentially endless.

Once your test specifications are set up, the software will run and graph out the network performance over time. So we have this software and we have the ‘targets’ within it which can be up in the 50’s depending on the location and size of the system, all of the targets are organized by which segment of the network the actual piece of hardware resides it whether it’s a router, switch, CMTS, power supply, UPS, modem, whatever and that’s only half the consistency problem, keeping these tests organized and keeping the specifications uniform across all of the systems. The other half is the worksheet that aides in the organization process, the worksheet is the database of all of the main workspaces for each system (a workspace is a set of targets) but since we’re constantly adding new equipment especially in our larger cable systems the worksheet falls out of date shortly after it’s updated.

This is only one example of a systems consistency problem that applies to a single application. Now just take this example and times it by 10 and you can get an idea of the organization that’s needed in this line of work.