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Sometimes I think corporate IT wants to set sail on the failboat

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Background: I work for a corporate IT office supporting a group of applications that are the most bandwith intensive we have. We account for over 50% of all traffic across the enterprise. We typically work directly with business staff at a number of regional facilities.

We have a datacenter & operations center housed in a different part of town than us.

Today was at least the 5th time in as many weeks that something major blew up...either a DS3 between facility and datacenter popped...or a big router between them...or a datacenter lost power in a rack...something like.

Anyway, the business calls us and says "Hey, our apps are slow and running like crap. What's up"? So we spend the better part of an hour trying to pick through application logs, server events, ect trying to figure out what's going on.

We end up hearing from another facility that "Oh yeah, so and so lost their DS3".

What? We wasted an hour trying to troubleshoot something we couldn't fix.

So I email our operations staff and ask them why we aren't getting emailed about this stuff. Being in direct support of a major application requires us to be in the loop for problems.

The ops manager mails me back and says "What, you didn't get the email"?

I replied back, nope. So he mails me back and bolds my managers name and copies in my manager and his boss. And leaves it at that.

So I fired back that the support staff for all other individual facilities get messages about enterprise wide systems...doesn't it make sense that the corporate support staff should be directly in that loop too? I don't think it's fair to my manager that he needs to waste time forwarding us messges when we should be primary recipients in the first place.

I'm waiting for a response back to that one. I just want to /facepalm over the unneeded beauracracy of the situation. I just don't get why local IS is notified but they can't include the freaking enterprise support team that has to fix the problems.

****CLIFFS****
1. I work enterprise app support
2. Something big at one site went kablooey
3. We didn't get the memo
4. Another site's local IT knew about it before us because they did get the memo
5. Help desk is trying to throw my manager under the bus for not forwarding said memo
 
log into exchange and delete the sent item and his recieved item....

Let your boss know how important memos can be sometimes.
 
Play Halo and do not take the webserver down?

I love the lack of communication sometimes. My favorite question has become, Did you email me? I usually get, no I emailed someone else. How does anyone expect us, you, me to fix something that we don't know is broken? Better yet, as noted above, fix something that we cannot.

BTW, send a group email to Help Desk that they are going to be outsourced.
 
It took a lot of squeaking before we got ourselves on one of those email distribution lists, despite our application being hosted on a server and needing 24/7 uptime.
 
Why offer a solution when you can blamestorm?

But seriously, there should be some sort of mailing list for problems like that that goes to ever manager in IT. And you should have at least just did a ping or trace route to your servers, 60 seconds and you could have seen that you have a circuit problem.
 
While you're right, isn't one of the first steps of troubleshooting anything to verify the connection?
 
mailing lists are you friend. We have bulliton lists here for that. one email address to send to, people can op in and out of it any time.
 
We also have a lot of bureaucracy here on IT and often I'm not notified about some problems or notified on problems that I have no relation with and 80% of the efforts are put on blaming another person/department rather than fix the problem.

The good news is that next time you will check for connectivity first.
 
Originally posted by: dougp
While you're right, isn't one of the first steps of troubleshooting anything to verify the connection?
Click to expand...

The DS3 blew, but they still had a couple T1's for backup lines. So they still had connectivity, but their bandwith was jacked. This manifested in horrible latency. Our end users noticed it before anyone else and started calling in. There's about 50 unique things that could cause latency in the application that was more of a server/application problem rather than network.

We'd see some latency running traceroutes but that's as far as my group can check. The networking group (which we aren't) has all that info.

But this particular issue is just one of many that we've put up with lately.
 
Try being the 50/50 guy (IT/development) at a company that thinks it has no IT.. that is large enough to have two or three dedicated IT guys..
 
I hate this too. The job itself of IT is great and I enjoy it, but the politics and the way some processes (or lack of) work can be annoying.
 
Sounds like networking guys dropped the ball on communication.

Tell them to give you a network map and do a traceroute next time.
 
You don't understand the purpose of bureaucracies. Management is not there to make the work more efficient. they are there to ensure their continued existence by creating policies and managing info so they remain indispensable. You do your part by researching and recommending solutions that "will be taken under consideration." Didn't you get the memo?

Seriously, the ONLY way to cure the lack of communication in a corporate environment is to not play the game. LEAVE, while you still have some sense of pride in what you do!
 
Originally posted by: MagnusTheBrewer
You don't understand the purpose of bureaucracies. Management is not there to make the work more efficient. they are there to ensure their continued existence by creating policies and managing info so they remain indispensable. You do your part by researching and recommending solutions that "will be taken under consideration." Didn't you get the memo?

Seriously, the ONLY way to cure the lack of communication in a corporate environment is to not play the game. LEAVE, while you still have some sense of pride in what you do!
Click to expand...

aka, "Castle Building"
 
Originally posted by: spidey07
Originally posted by: MagnusTheBrewer
You don't understand the purpose of bureaucracies. Management is not there to make the work more efficient. they are there to ensure their continued existence by creating policies and managing info so they remain indispensable. You do your part by researching and recommending solutions that "will be taken under consideration." Didn't you get the memo?

Seriously, the ONLY way to cure the lack of communication in a corporate environment is to not play the game. LEAVE, while you still have some sense of pride in what you do!
Click to expand...

aka, "Castle Building"
Click to expand...

The castle was completed in the 80's. They're adding wings and remodeling now.
 
Originally posted by: spidey07
Why offer a solution when you can blamestorm?

But seriously, there should be some sort of mailing list for problems like that that goes to ever manager in IT. And you should have at least just did a ping or trace route to your servers, 60 seconds and you could have seen that you have a circuit problem.
Click to expand...

Yeah... whenever I got a complaint about slow application performance at a branch site, the first thing I did was test the network connectivity to the site.

I knew that my servers were built to be bulletproof and had some crazy high uptime percentage around 99.99% , so I always tried to blame performance issues on the network whenever possible. I was usually right, too 🙂
 
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