Vendor Management Tips

Overview

This post is for technical operations folks managing vendor contracts. For technical people dealing with vendors and legal paperwork can be a bit complicated, and I hope that the information from the post will be very handy.

The vendor management process can be roughly outlined in the following steps (described in details later in this post):

1. Research
2. Price negotiations and service testing
3. Contract negotiation
4. Management of vendor contracts

In this article I’ll primarily concentrate on vendors demanding long term commitment (6+ months) on small and medium volume contracts (from $1000/month to $20,000/month), but some tips are also relevant to month-to-month agreements and large volume deals.

What to monitor on a Linux box

This article is a kind of reminder for me (and for anyone else managing a monitoring system) about which metrics should/can be monitored for different kind of hardware and software components in a modern production system. The listed metrics primarily assume the usage of Nagios, Graphite, collectl and logcheck monitoring tools.

Metrics, metrics, metrics...

A lot has been said about the importance of system and application metrics - I'll not repeat this, and will concentrate on of-the-shelf options available to implement a robust, usable and scalable metrics collection and monitoring system.

We will talk about three main areas:

1. How to generate/create metrics
2. How to collect and represent the metrics
3. How to monitor the collected metrics