Still trying to figure out exactly what they mean by MVP, but they made me one and wanted me to post an intro, so here it goes...
Many years ago, I'm thinking maybe 2003, I started working at a large enterprise business who had maybe 220+ WAN links and was monitoring maybe 20 of them with MRTG manually configured on a Linux box. At first I developed some perl scripts to make it easier to monitor all of our WAN links and they were pretty happy about that. Having been familiar with the Solarwinds Engineers Toolkit, when I noticed a new product they had call Solarwinds Orion I decided to give it a try. I loaded it up, put a few of our nodes on a map of the US, and had it monitor for a few days. Not long after I was playing with it some more when my boss at the time snuck up behind me and asked "What's that?". Getting over the initial nervousness of him sneaking up behind me like that when I was playing around, I started to show him the little bit I knew about Orion and how easy it was to do a much better job of monitoring WAN links than we had ever been doing. Within probably 5 minutes he said "Get a quote" and the decision to purchase was nearly immediate.
Then we built up our environment , first the routers, then the switches and AP's, then other devices including servers. We added on one module after another and very quickly replaced other systems we had like Ciscoworks and Spectrum and did a far better job than either of them. Using NCM we were able to standardize our configurations and our network transformed into something we thought we knew about, but didn't really, into something we had full visibility into.
I joined Thwack pretty early on, and was in the first batch of people who took the Beta Exam to get my SCP, but was somewhat sporadic in my activity here. Went to work for the NNSA for a bit where I convinced them to use Orion to monitor their environment also, and then got out of actively managing a network while I took a sales position selling Cisco products to Sandia Labs. After that I wanted to get back into the thick of things and took a position with a company that already had an active, yet a bit disorganized, Solarwinds installation and since then its been pretty non-stop. Mainly due to the demands of wanting different reports, resources and views. They had NCM before I started, but hadn't implemented it, so that was done pretty quickly. Since then I've grown the environment over two-fold, making sure all devices were managed, and developed many compliance reports to bring our environment into a more standard set of configurations.
So, at this point in addition to my SCP, I've also been a CCNP and CCDA for quite some time. I also hold an older MCSE. From my start with a Commodore Pet in 77 or 78, I've worked as a student Unix System Administrator at Purdue University and helped a couple people start up Internet Service Providers from probably 1996 to 2003.
Still pretty low on the points scale, I think I've been advancing pretty quickly this year. Should break 50K fairly soon i think. But, I find it a big honor to be named as an MVP with Thwack! Hope I live up to it! For those of you wanting to achieve MVP status, I think the key is to be helpful and vocal. Participate in the UX studies, give your feedback on what you like and dislike about the product. Help out others by answering question, and ask questions yourself. I find that I can learn some pretty cool stuff discovering answers for others questions.
Be sure to check out one of my latest posts! A CDP resource to add to your Nodes Detail page which lists the CDP neighbors for that node, I think its pretty cool!! Was working with CDP for another reason and just had a brainstorm this morning that it would be a neat resource to have there!! I'm very happy with the results, I think many of you will like it too...
https://thwack.solarwinds.com/docs/DOC-186601?sr=stream
Let me know what you think about it!