RE: Slight OT: Remote DBA team & effective support & communication
Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2011 14:38:37 +0000
Message-ID: <BD475CE0B3EE894DA0CAB36CE2F7DEB4454A88A9_at_LITIGMBCRP02.Corp.Acxiom.net>
Joe, good point! I'll have to check if OEM has any plugins for CA ServiceDesk. DAVID HERRING
DBA
Acxiom Corporation
EML dave.herring_at_acxiom.com
TEL 630.944.4762
MBL 630.430.5988
1501 Opus Pl, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA WWW.ACXIOM.COM<http://www.acxiom.com/>
The information contained in this communication is confidential, is intended only for the use of the recipient named above, and may be legally privileged. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please resend this communication to the sender and delete the original message or any copy of it from your computer system. Thank you.
From: TESTAJ3_at_nationwide.com [mailto:TESTAJ3_at_nationwide.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 02, 2011 9:30 AM
To: Herring Dave - dherri
Cc: oracle-l List
Subject: Re: Slight OT: Remote DBA team & effective support & communication
I've seen this problem with people sitting next to each other, email is unfortunately easily ignored and now there is no tracking of what is done, requests, etc.
Eventually all of our oem alerts will be sending out help desk tickets(just as if someone called in), which cannot be ignored as they have escalations if no one picks it up and resolves it.
Not sure that helped much.
joe
[cid:image001.jpg_at_01CC9942.EE2B2D00]
From:
Herring Dave - dherri <Dave.Herring_at_acxiom.com>
To:
oracle-l List <oracle-l_at_freelists.org>
Date:
11/02/2011 10:24 AM
Subject:
Slight OT: Remote DBA team & effective support & communication
Sent by:
oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
I'm curious how many of you belong to DBA teams where you rarely, if ever, go into an office and work side-by-side with other DBAs on your team. For those who answer "yes, I rarely go into the office ...", then have you come up with any effective methods for managing communication and support across the team?
My current team is spread across the world in 4 timezones and we use email almost exclusively for communication and monitoring. OEM & crontab monitoring is handled by sending us emails for various warning/critical events, on which we need to respond within a given amount of time. We also get various information emails from these monitoring jobs to keep track of what's going on across the many systems we support. All this leads to a tremendous volume of email.
What have we done to still be effective? All emails from monitoring jobs have a Subject line prefix that categorizes the email, so we can write all sorts of Outlook rules to manage the incoming emails. We've also worked hard at making sure we only get emails from these jobs when absolutely necessary for our job. I've also given examples of how to set Outlook rules to auto-forward incoming email to your cell phone when it's an emergency and you're oncall, even an example of how to create rules with multiple ANDs and ORs by flagging emails and then rules against those flagged emails.
Yet with all this, emails are still getting ignored and/or half read. Volume shouldn't be an excuse, because we all get tons of emails and organizational solutions have been presented. Emails I send out are also ignored/half read, so emailing about the issue won't work.
I'm not sure what else to do, which is why I'm asking you all for strategies/rules/guidelines that you follow. Is every DBA REQUIRED to set up a set of Outlook rules for managing support-related email? Do you have other methods and are they a requirement? Email doesn't appear to be going away, more systems seem to be 24 x 7 and DBAs seem to be given higher demands on what they monitor. To me it doesn't appear our current methods are working, much less handle future increases.
I'm not sure I want responses to this, but is the problem with me and that I'm too wordy, have too high of expectations and am a perfectionist?
Hopefully this thread can be a worthwhile discussion and not just ranting on others, which I can't help but do when trying to explain my current frustation. Thanks to anyone who is still reading this!
DAVID HERRING
DBA
Acxiom Corporation
EML dave.herring_at_acxiom.com
TEL 630.944.4762
MBL 630.430.5988
1501 Opus Pl, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA
WWW.ACXIOM.COM
The information contained in this communication is confidential, is intended only for the use of the recipient named above, and may be legally privileged. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please resend this communication to the sender and delete the original message or any copy of it from your computer system. Thank you.
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Received on Wed Nov 02 2011 - 09:38:37 CDT