I was going to make a joke about an uncomfortable unicorn and tooting my own horn… but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

Seriously though, starting next week I’ll be a Thwack Ambassador on the Thwack Community hosted by SolarWinds.

Thwack is a community for people who manage, monitor, or deploy stuff. There are consultants, administrators, a few SolarWinds gurus, and generally people interested in having an easier life in systems/network/virtualization administration.

I’ll be sharing, and soliciting, some thoughts on topics around alerting and oncall, for the next four weeks. I also hope, if I can, to use, in a manner of speaking, way more commas than one, in his right mind, that is, might use. </shatner>

SolarWinds, as you may know, produces software to monitor and manage networks, servers, virtualization, logs, and more. They have a number of free products that you can use, from an SSH client and a very popular tftp/sftp server to IP address management and a subnet calculator (great for those of you with ten fingers rather than two). But this isn’t about their products.

#include <disclaimer.h>

I am paid a bit for my stint as a Thwack Ambassador. I am given a very broad theme to work from, but they don’t get to specify what I write about. So as with my own blog, you’ll be reading what I find interesting and/or true.

Come see me on Thwack next week, share your thoughts (there’s bound to be a contest for people who interact with me and my co-ambassador for March, Jeremy Stretch), and hopefully you’ll find (and share) some new ideas and solutions.

Update: My first post is up: Let’s just eliminate alerting altogether, okay? Check it out for a chance to win an iPod Nano!