Wednesday the 4th Santi, Andrew, and Jon found themselves on the VMWare campus again. This time we would be meeting Denis, the dogfood environment IT Admin at VMWare to talk about the issues he had with the current products VMWare and competitors offered.
Denis generously gave us an hour of his time to walk us through the current IT management solutions offered by VMWare. This was a great exposure to what the current products looked like and behaved, as well as how IT Admins traversed these products. Some of what we saw was not too surprising; boring, unflashy software. We were often waiting extended periods of time for widgets to load and render. Also Denis seemed to have to jump around from application to application to get all the information he needed- it gave the impression that there was no great dashboard for all of the information Denis wanted in one place. Another interesting thing was that Denis seemed to be annoyed by many of the visualization widgets that were scattered throughout the various applications, his preferred dashboard to monitor key statistics was very simple and consisted of three bar graphs for CPU Usage, Memory Usage, and Storage Usage.
We asked Denis typical needfinding questions, some resulting into very specific digressions, others bearing great insight. In particular, when asked "What is the most frustrating part of your job?" Denis responded "troubleshooting." He explained that when there is a failure in his IT infrastructure it is often very difficult and time-consuming to resolve the error. Reminiscent of the first project Karthik pitched us in our initial meeting, Denis explained that there are many points of failure in these systems and some of these are outside of the scope of his job/access. If he believed there was a problem with the storage, he would have to talk to the storage guys (who might be busy). If he believed there was a problem with the network, he would have to talk to the network guys (who also might be busy). While this was happening the users he supports would be out of service. He explained that this process was very frustrating, time-consuming, and occasionally meant he would be up late in the office troubleshooting in hopes that he could fix the issue before the next work day. He also explained that all the "predictive" systems to anticipate failures that he had dealt with were "total crap." Altogether, this was incredibly valuable insight into the life of an IT Admin.
We also gave Denis an idea of what we were hoping to build. His reaction was not very enthusiastic and it didn't seem like something he would ever use and definitely was not something he currently needed.