Another OSS “forehead-slap” moment!

I don’t know about you, but I find this industry of ours has a remarkable ability to keep us humble. Barely a day goes by when I don’t have to slap my forehead and say, “uhhh…. of course!” (or perhaps, “D’oh!!”)

I had one such instance yesterday. I couldn’t figure out why a client’s telemetry / performance-management suite needed an inventory ingestion interface. Can you think of a reason (you probably can)???

My mind had followed the line of thinking that it was for reconciling with traditional inventory systems or perhaps some sort of topology reckoning. It’s far more rudimentary than that. 

Have you figured out what it might be used for yet?

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Enrichment!

For example, if device names (hostnames) attached to the metrics aren’t human-readable, simple, just enrich the data with its human-readable alternate name. If you don’t know what device type is generating sub-sets of metrics, no problems, just enrich the data.

I’d heard of enrichment of alarms/event of course, but hadn’t followed that line of thinking for performance management before. Does your performance management stack allow you to enrich its data sets?

Seems obvious in hindsight! Smacked down again!!

I’d love to hear any anecdotes you have where OSS gave you a “forehead slap” moment.