If this is our public facing image, what are our internal development efforts like? ...

Broadcast engineers can relate! ...

Broadcast engineers and media IT professionals, are you wondering if you have set up NTP properly on your servers and other devices? Take a look at my guide to NTP Best Practices in a Broadcast Facility for some practical advice.

Joe Zaller at Devoncroft examines who broadcast hardware and software vendors think is the most important decision maker at their customers. Broadcast engineers remain the most important perceived decision maker, but vendors still predict that our importance will decrease over time. The only thing is that vendors have been making that same prediction for years. ...

In Big Data/Web Scale website operations, resiliency testing is getting a lot of attention with updated methods. Yes, traditional software unit and integration testing are still key to developing reliable software. A growing number of companies taking a more active approach to testing resiliency. They actually induce failures that test a live system’s reaction. Amazon, Google, and Etsy use GameDay exercises. Netflix employs a Simian Army. I can see the reaction of most broadcasting managers if you were to propose GameDay testing an air chain....

As technologists and engineers, are we asking or answering the wrong questions about our new or potential systems too often? These wrong questions fall into different categories, but they all have right questions or, even better, statements that you or your customers can use to replace them. Here are two that have reached pet-peeve levels for me. “What does the product do?” When an operations or other business customer asks this question, they focus on the technology and not the business....

Despite the fact that the IT industry is light years ahead of Broadcast Engineering in implementing service management processes and general governance, individual IT departments still experience resistance. Reichental relays recent experience with the difficulties in putting a governance program in place at O’Reilly Media. When you read through the article, try substituting Engineering every time he says IT. ...

Millsap’s ACM Queue article on performance tuning introduced me to some basics of queuing theory. The article discusses some considerations for tuning the performance of a database. One aspect that Millsap addresses is queuing delay, or the amount of time it takes for a system to begin processing a request. This is the amount of time the request waits in the queue before the system acts on it. As utilization of the system increases, the delay increases. A request needs to wait until more things in front finish. ...

A Broadcast Engineer’s Guide to Troubleshooting a Network Problem is now available. I based it on a training presentation I’ve used in the past. I’ve tried to do my best to adapt the presentation format into a static document.

One of the big components of Service Management is defining processes for supporting technology. You set up a process for documenting changes, a process for requesting new services, a process for implementing that new service, etc…. That scares many broadcasters. We jump to the conclusion that a process is going to be some long, arduous quest for managerial approval that grinds to a halt every time we have to ask a new person for input. ...