Well, here we are again, at the start of a New Year. This is the time for everyone to list out his or her goals and resolutions, and be reminded of how miserably they failed at such things over the previous year.
Here are my resolutions for 2016. You're welcome.
Lose wait
We all hate to wait.
We hate waiting for traffic, for the next episode of Sherlock, or for Cleveland to have a winning football team.
You know what else we hate waiting for? Data. We hate waiting for a database to return results from simple queries and reports. We hate not knowing why a report has not finished. And we hate waiting for the database administrator to fix things.
So this year I’m going to take the time to understand more about what my queries are waiting for. I’m going to take the time to learn about wait events, resource bottlenecks, and the options available to help tune the queries as needed.
Sort out my inbox
Application systems become more complex with each passing day, and they require additional monitoring along the way. The end result is an inbox full of alerts.
I’m tired of the clutter, and so are you.
So in 2016, I will find a way to make sure that I am only being alerted for things that require action. I will start by digging into the alert system to see if I can find out why the alert in question was generated. Then I can start being proactive in my work so that the amount of time needed to react to alerts is minimized.
I know that one-hour of time being spent weekly in a proactive way can save me up to three hours of time I now spend weekly in a reactive mode. That’s a lot of extra time I can better spend looking at pictures of cats and arguing with strangers on the Internet.
Be nicer to my coworkers
Just putting the word DevOps and emojis into emails isn’t enough. In 2016, I’m going to find a way to use monitoring tools to help facilitate communications. I will start to communicate ideas using reports based on the data our tools are collecting.
And by doing so I will help reduce the number of “blamestorming” meetings that happen frequently right now.
Now, these are my resolutions for 2016, feel free to use them for yourself if you want. But I’d encourage you to think about your own resolutions for the upcoming year. Think about the ways you can make things better for yourself and for others and then put those resolutions to work. How? By entering them in the 2016 IT Resolutions contest.
Meanwhile, I want to hear your thoughts about my list, your list, or your IT plans for 2016 in general, in the comments below.
