Abhilash V Menon was born in a beautiful village called Puthuvely in Kerala, India. From childhood, he was curious about everything came into his way. He was crazy about exploring them until he could solve the puzzle. One day, a desktop computer came into his way. He started exploring it as usual. He noticed that whenever he put a piece of puzzle in its place, there are hundreds of other new pieces popping up around him. He is still putting them together, every day, hoping one day he could design a piece by himself.
He wanted to become a programmer when he was doing his graduation, but when he saw the industry closely, that changed his mind.
He realized that spending entire life in doing programming in a certain language is not what he likes. He wanted to learn something new, and entirely different every day. So he elected Infrastructure Monitoring as his career, as there is a wide opportunity to learn both latest and oldest technologies every day.
He enjoys sharing knowledge a lot. He believes that hiding knowledge is a crime. He learns new things till late night and share them to his friends and colleagues in the day time.
He had worked on a number of leading infrastructure monitoring tools like Microsoft SCOM, BMC Proactive Net, CA Spectrum, HP OpenView and Nagios. Now he is a Senior SCOM Engineer and Management Pack Developer at Datacom New Zealand. He could literally monitor anything from the status of your server to the brightness of your bedroom lamp through SCOM! He introduced a term called SCOMification which he defines as "The process of discovering and monitoring a mission critical real world business scenario in Microsoft SCOM.
In such a way that it can be discovered automatically, monitored flexibly, notified to different technical towers, presented to different business level people in different format which make sense to them, and the data could be stored in data warehouse for historical analysis and business intelligence."
He recently started a blog for upcoming SCOMifiers, which is intended to help them SCOMify anything they want for FREE.
You can access the blog at http://scomifyit.com.
You can read more about him at http://abhie.me or contact him directly through his email <[email protected]>.
Randall Smith is a Sr. Systems Administrator for Adams State University. He has been administering Windows, Linux, and BSD systems since 1999.
Randall has been active in helping other SysAdmins solve problems and making their jobs easier though his blog, IRC, and social media. He has presented at the Colorado Higher Ed Computing Organization and Educause conferences, on topics such as Linux KVM, and the Ceph storage system.