Planning NI – 9/1/2009

First off, welcome to September.

Secondly, welcome to week 10!  This week we finish up the book by knocking the last two chapters of the book out of the park.  Luckily, these two chapters are, well, stuff we’ve covered before.

As you know, I struggle with these topics repeating themselves the way that they do.  On the one hand, they’re extremely important and WILL be tested on the certification exam (trust me, they will).  On the other hand, how many times can you go over the intricacies of Performance Monitor and Backup.

So, in the light of this conflict, I decided that I would try to show you some things about the technologies we discussed today that maybe we haven’t seen before.  To do this, I had to completely reexamine how I teach Performance Monitor.

To start out, I talked about counter logs and trace logs.  Counter logs are designed to be captures of past “scans” and can be viewed inside the System Monitor portion of Performance Monitor.  This is great for pulling up in a presentation, etc.  Trace logs are logs that show us how an application is using certain system resources, like RAM.

In addition, I tried to spend a little time in customizing the charts in System Monitor, something I have traditionally skipped over, assuming everyone would know  how to do.  We discussed the benefits of giving your charts appropriate names and even giving your Y-axis appropriate scales.

Next, we looked at troubleshooting, but this time it was more from a TCP/IP perspective.  Basically, we went over the basic IPv4 addressing mechanism and went over problems that can arise.  As an added bonus, I through in some IPv6 coverage!  WOO!

Homework:

• Since this is the last week of class, none!
• That is, unless you have to take the final next week.
• If that’s the case — STUDY!