24. 09. 2022 Mattia Codato Development, NetEye

Consultant for a Day (or Three)

In August I had the opportunity to assist an experienced consultant who was upgrading a NetEye cluster.

Now, I’m a software developer, and while I know the consultants here who work with clients, I’ve always worked at the Würth Phoenix offices. I’ve never actually gone out in the field.

So my goal was to try to put myself into a consultant’s shoes, and then I could turn around and use that experience back in my everyday work as a software developer.

Like everything you do for the first time I was a bit nervous, but at the same time I was excited to meet a real, live client and especially to be able to do something in person that I’ve only worked on in a test environment.

The plan was to upgrade their production cluster from version 4.22 to 4.23. As you’re probably aware, NetEye 4.23 includes an operating system upgrade to RedHat 8. So the upgrade procedure takes a bit longer than usual. After getting everything prepared ahead of time, we would still need to schedule 3 days of work.

A description of the full upgrade procedure can be found here, while you can read about another consultant’s experience upgrading here.

After meeting the client, I had a chance to tour their infrastructure and then get an overview of the important role that NetEye plays in monitoring it.

I immediately understood the enormous complexity of their tailor-made installation, which was achieved thanks to the many customizations our consultants had worked on to meet all the client’s use cases.

As usual, we started by performing routine backups and then continued with the pre-upgrade checks that are well described in the user guide until we were satisfied everything was ready. We were then finally able to move on to the upgrade of the first node.

The upgrade itself was smooth and trouble-free, and by the end of the day we had the first node running version 4.23.

The second day began with the activation of the new RedHat 8 cluster composed of the first node now upgraded to the new version. Most of this day was spent making sure that the various customizations continued to work properly, and updating or fixing various monitoring checks that used packages that were no longer available in the new RedHat version.

We spent the rest of that day and the next upgrading the second and third nodes. Before the end of the last day, the clusters had been successfully upgraded to the new version of NetEye.

During those few days I was able not only to observe a real NetEye installation, but also to immerse myself in the shoes both of a consultant and of our users.

I noted our product’s strengths that they liked, but also those areas that we could improve on. I listened to the customer’s suggestions, and carefully observed how the end user interacts with our product.

Looking back on this experience, I can say that in my daily work as a developer, it has definitely helped me to start looking at the development process from a new point of view, and having a stronger awareness of how making more useful and accurate decisions as a developer can benefit everyone.

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Did you find this article interesting? Does it match your skill set? Our customers often present us with problems that need customized solutions. In fact, we’re currently hiring for roles just like this and others here at Würth Phoenix.