The Importance of Measuring Your IT Operations

I think that the following are fundamental metrics in IT OPS:

• Feature Average Lead Time (FALT). This is the average number of days it takes for a request, from the moment was originated, to hit production. 
• Development Cost for a Deployed Feature (DECODEF). This is the development cost of getting a feature deployed into production. It comes down to bare people cost.
• Keep The Lights On (KTLO) cost for an information system.  This is the infrastructure cost for a particular service. 
• Number and Cost of Production Bugs after a release (NCPB). This measure is meant to provide both a figure around quality and a figure around quantity. 
• Cost of mainteining Legacy Systems (COLS). This is the people cost in interacting with Legacy systems for issue investigation, small enhancements, production bugs
• Cost of Evergreening (COE). This is the cost of keeping the various technologies to a version which is supported by third party vendors.
• Business Value of each Deliverable to production (BUVD). This is perhaphs the most difficult figure to get since it's not an exact science (how would one quantify the business value of Evergreening?)

Taken from: http://java.dzone.com/articles/importance-measuring-your-it?

Cloud Automation with Chef

I've stumbled on this Slideshare presentation on using Chef to automate cloud. This presentation is basically a how to guide that should be "required reading" before even considering using Cloud.

You can find it here

This is scary: Cautionary tale: Do you know where your customer database is?

[...]not just one, but TWO customer database files — one 4 MB .txt file and one 13 MB .bak file that was also plain text — comprised of ~11,000 users, each containing varying amounts of confidential information as noted above. From http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/cautionary-tale-do-you-know-where-your-customer-database-is/61811

It is at once sad and scary that this kind of mistakes would still happen. Come on! Governance and professionalism anyone???