Do you know about Write or Die? It’s described as “putting the prod into productivity” and is for procrastinating writers to force themselves to write. (Writers procrastinate. It’s a thing. You can spend hours surfing the web for baby name pages to come up with the perfect name for your walk-on character. Or you can name him John Doe and fix it in revisions. The latter is probably more productive.) You enter a word goal and a time limit and click “Write,” and any time you stop writing the screen turns red. If you stop long enough, an annoying sound will play. You might get RickRolled, or have painfully bad violin practice, but I’ve set my copy of the desktop edition to exclusively play the crying babies sound.
This is the perfect metaphor for my monitoring philosophy.
For this reason, it makes me a little insane that I have 392 new email messages from SQL Monitor today about fragmented indexes. (My phone said 687.) That’s a whole lot of crying babies. Apparently, I have some work to do.
I’m much happier when my baby monitor is silent and the monitoring page shows a lot of happy, peaceful servers. You know, when I come in the morning and look and they’re all cheerfully perking away doing their thing. I used to keep my Nagios screen 100% green, and it made me a little wacky when we merged Nagios servers and I added the servers of the guys who actually like getting their daily, “Yes, your hard drive is still 100% full!” emails. *twitch* Ah well, it makes them happy.
There’s a Nagios plugin for Firefox that plays a sound when you have a problem. I’d like to get that to play the crying babies sound. The advantage to that would be that if anything of mine ever broke, not only would my sensibilities be offended, but if I didn’t fix it promptly my coworkers would kill me and no one would ever find my body! Now there’s putting the prod into productivity!
And now? Apparently, I need to go into the nursery and shut up calm some babies. (Not about the indexes, about Something Else.)
