For the past 3 years and 7-ish months, I have been spending my days with Loop1 customizing the full range of SolarWinds products. From NPM to DameWare to SEM and PM, I have been blessed in my career to be in a position that allows me to not only teach others this craft we call monitoring, but also to work with clients to make their visions reality through a little work, some google-fu, and a fair bit of whiteboarding.
In my latest role at Loop1, I have been chosen to join the Public Training line of business to redesign and deliver all of our course offerings. This is a really exciting role for me as it combines the passion I have for evangelizing the role of monitoring in IT with the experience I have gained over the years of being around some of the best and brightest minds in our industry. With that in mind, I will be keeping this blog updated with some random musings, tips, tricks, thoughts, opinions, and perhaps the occasional ode-to-coffee.
For the first release, I would like to share one of the simplest and most well-received customizations that I have in my bag of tricks (read: dropbox): The Scrolling Marquee
Generally placed on your primary Orion Home page, this Custom HTML resource is a great way to notify your users of upcoming maintenance windows, upgrades, or other system-wide messages. Utilizing the “marquee” tag from HTML (much to the chagrin of our web developer brethren), it also incorporates movement which catches the eye and prevents the user skimming past important notifications.
<font color = “red”>
<font size = “6”>
<b>
<marquee behavior= “scroll” direction= “left”>
Welcome To Loop1 Public Training!
</marquee>
</b>
</font>
</font>
That’s it for the first instalment. Please keep your eye out for more.
Happy Monitoring!
Zack Mutchler
Thwack MVP and SCP