The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

I remember a day when we had a problem with our order processing.  When we finally figured out what was wrong, there were a few embarrassed people.  We had introduced some new monitoring to the system, but had done so in such a way that we added a point of failure to the ordering process.

This was and is a bad thing.  And it can be avoided easily by making sure that you use a passive monitoring system.  By its very nature the state of a passive system has no impact on the system being monitored. (more…)

Whether we are talking about e-commerce or any other movement of data, we will need to capture points of data to ensure proper monitoring and reliability. There is an overall strategy to this, and three types of data points that should be monitored; Points that are convenient. Points that are helpful.  And points that are necessary. With these points monitored and the data that passes them recorded and aggregated properly, a reliable and supportable system is created. (more…)

I was reading an article on Spend Matters, by Jason Busch, and I had an idea. Jason was writing about Twitter entering the B2B Mainstream. Now to be honest I had heard about Southwest’s proactive use of twitter to monitor and shape how their customer experience was being perceived.  And like many things with Southwest’s business, I find it to be touched with brilliance.  So as I read about it, I was suddenly struck with a much deeper way that twitter and twitter like technologies could be used. (more…)