Each of our projects and clients has a story to tell, and we’d like to share that when we can.

Education Foundation

The McPherson Education Foundation is tasked with pushing the technology envelope at McPherson Magnet School amidst a bureaucracy that is slow, by nature and by design, to change. With this freedom, the foundation has the unenviable task of funding these initiatives. McPherson Magnet is a K-8 public school in Orange, California which focuses on Math, Science, and Technology.

Fundraising and Story Telling

One of the major fund-raising events of the year is a raffle during the spring Open House. A number of teachers, parents, individuals and local businesses with a heart of giving contribute really fantastic donations. The gamut runs from autographed Angels baseballs, to rock climbing outings, to local artists sketches, to basketball and pizza with teachers. Each of these items, events and contributors, in turn, has a story to tell.

That’s a lot of story-telling.

Volunteers assembled gift baskets over the weekend, and a talented local photographer (and parent) came in to photograph the baskets that were ready.

In all, there were some 100 baskets ready for the raffle a few days later.

The Challenge

One of the challenges with an Open House is sheer craziness of events going on in a short few hours. How do you streamline the evening, yet prepare parents and kids with the variety of raffle items?

With a very small (repeat, very small) window of time, we tried a little experiment. Our team at meshbrains quickly put together a dynamic site, based on Rails, MongoDB, and the magical little isotope.js library. The site allows the volunteers coordinating the raffle to upload images and descriptions, as well as classifying the grade levels and ticket ranges. The school staff sent out a link to the micro-site a few days early as a part of an email blast reminding parents about the Open House. Parents and kids could get the inside scoop on all the great goodies before stepping on campus.

The turn out at Open House was fantastic.

Lessons Learned

The school has some 800 students. In 48 hours, the site had about 250 unique visitors, averaging 5 minutes and 30 seconds on the site. This was the first year, so this is our baseline. Post-game commentary indicated that once the kids learned of the site, they were most curious about the items. Though the email blast was geared to the parents, the kids were most excited and wanted to know ahead of time what was going to be at the raffle. The foundation can explore new communication channels next year.

We didn’t get a chance to add more story telling. With some more advance preparation, we could better recognize contributors, link to local businesses, and add background to many of the unique offerings.

The site won’t win any design awards. Quick and dirty, it got the job done. We don’t know the specific fiscal impact the site had, but it feels like it was in the right direction. Sometimes that’s enough.

System monitoring tools have been around since the beginning of systems. A quick Google search for “system monitoring software” returns over 21 million results. It’s literally from “A” to “Z”.  Accel Ops to Zenoss with a ton of systems in between.  Each has its own hook, some with reporting for the bosses and some application specific. All can measure uptime. Picking one is like choosing ice cream, what flavor do you like?

Over the past few years, I have worked with Nagios, Zabbix, Solarwinds Orion, Tivoli and Zenoss. All are more than adequate for most environments. Nagios is cheap but it will take some time to install. I’m going to mention Tivoli but it’s not affordable unless you work in a heavy IBM shop. Orion is by far the slickest system but it’s also expensive, approximately $10,000, including equipment, to start. If you have a spare stack of cash  laying around and need an “Out of the Box” install, this is the monitoring package for you.

With a slow economy, not many want to spend their precious dollars on an expensive monitoring tool. How would you spend $10,000 if it was available? I don’t think a monitoring system would be at the top of the list. Monitoring is a must in any enterprise but it’s hard to qualify the spend.

A few years ago I gave Zenoss a second look. The core (free) package had come a long way and due to their efforts the user community began to grow and provide a decent amount of feedback as well as community based add-ons. I decided to give it a try and had a core system up and running in about an hour monitoring about 10 network devices and 20 or so servers. It worked great and we decided to run it in parallel with our Nagios install.

Last November we gave Nagios the boot and migrated all our monitoring to Zenoss.  Today, we use Zenoss to monitor our California and Chicago area data centers. We couldn’t be happier.

Put your old hardware to work and give Zenoss a try.

Zenoss Core