Blog Entries

25. 08. 2021 Charles Callaway Documentation, PHP

A Dead Simple CMS/WAMP Development Environment

Suppose you need to set up or maintain a simple but professional looking website on Windows (maybe even on a budget), be able to develop using tools like PHP, have it all work even when you don’t have web access, and then once you’re done, wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to compile,…

Read More
30. 06. 2021 Charles Callaway Documentation

Making Your Own Video Tutorials, Part 5: Publishing on YouTube

Congratulations on finishing your first tutorial video! So now you can put it on your corporate web site, and maybe email or tweet out a link to it. But what about visibility? If your business is large enough to have a marketing department, you (or they) will likely want your tutorial videos to be part…

Read More
20. 04. 2021 Charles Callaway Documentation

Making Your Own Video Tutorials, Part 4: Editing and Compositing

In my previous blog post we looked at how to use a green screen to add an extra touch to the tutorial videos you upload to YouTube, particularly focusing on the ambient space for filming, the lighting (both the screen itself and the subject), and the necessary audio and video equipment. The goal of using…

Read More
26. 02. 2021 Charles Callaway Documentation

Making Your Own Tutorials, Part 3: Using a Green Screen

In my last blog post we looked at practical suggestions for improving the tutorial videos you upload to YouTube, focusing on tips for audio recording, video recording and editing, writing the script, and uploading them. Now suppose you want to take the next step that will (hopefully!) add some impact to your tutorials: putting yourself…

Read More
11. 01. 2021 Charles Callaway Documentation

Making Your Own YouTube Tutorials, Part 2

In my previous post I described the kind of tasks, resources and software that we had to master in order to create YouTube IT tutorial videos like the 20 Alyvix videos we made in 2020. As we looked back to compare the first few videos we made with the last few, it was easy to…

Read More
30. 12. 2020 Charles Callaway Documentation

Making Your Own YouTube Tutorials, Part 1

In a recent blog post I described our new Alyvix YouTube channel that contains the 20 Alyvix tutorial videos we’ve created this year. Each video is a self-contained tutorial that showcases one aspect of how Alyvix can be used for visual monitoring, both practical application examples and for learning basic concepts and operations. Since one…

Read More
21. 12. 2020 Charles Callaway Documentation, Unified Monitoring, Visual Synthetic Monitoring

The Alyvix Video Tutorial Channel on YouTube

This year we introduced an Alyvix YouTube channel to complement the written Alyvix user guide. It now contains a number of videos that explain how to monitor specific tasks as well as explaining background knowledge about the building blocks you can use to create your own Alyvix test cases. At the end of this year…

Read More
03. 12. 2020 Charles Callaway Documentation

Creating Documentation in Sphinx

Most small open source documentation projects use Markdown to create their project documentation. After all, it has a minimalistic and thus easy-to-learn syntax, does all the basics well, renders very quickly (even quickly enough to create a real-time WYSIWYG viewer), and is almost universally supported across popular web platforms like GitHub. At some point, though,…

Read More
01. 12. 2019 Charles Callaway Documentation, NetEye

Squaring the User Guide Circle

The official Icinga 2 user guide is quite extensive, but it’s not always complete.  That’s normal in today’s world of fast changing software where the focus is on delivering new capabilities quickly.  Even here at NetEye most of the documentation we produce for our user guide is written when we add new modules and features,…

Read More
04. 11. 2019 Charles Callaway Bug Fixes, NetEye

Bug Fixes for NetEye 4.8

We updated the icingaweb2 module. The release of v2.7.1 introduced a change which revealed an inefficient part of database queries. This bugfix includes improvements and it has now faster response times by less work for the database server. For NetEye 4.8 we updated: icingaweb2 to version 2.7.3_neteye1.49.2-2

Read More
14. 10. 2019 Charles Callaway Bug Fixes

Bug Fixes for NetEye 4.8

We corrected the installation instructions for the Tornado module. These had remained unchanged from version 4.7 when only the Tornado backend was installed. The updated instructions will also install the Tornado GUI. For NetEye 4.8 we updated: icingaweb2 to version 2.7.1_neteye1.49.0-1

Read More
08. 07. 2019 Charles Callaway Documentation, Unified Monitoring

“How To” Improve the User Guide

Every software suite needs documentation. But the more features we add to NetEye to meet customer needs, the larger the user guide becomes.  Over time, it’s important to make sure that the guide continues to meet the needs of NetEye users despite this. In particular, modern methodologies like Agile that we use in NetEye often…

Read More
29. 03. 2019 Charles Callaway Cloud, NetEye

SMS Notifications by Bridging Ethernet and Serial with Moxa’s NPort

Monitoring needs to take place wherever data is collected, which may not always be right next to your NetEye server. If you have poor signal reception, or else you’re running on a virtual machine, and you need 24×7 availability, notification via SMS may be the only option. Sometimes you just can’t run a serial cable…

Read More
27. 12. 2018 Charles Callaway NetEye, Unified Monitoring

Research & Development – A New User Guide Process (Part 4)

Software grows.  So do software teams.  To avoid getting slow and rusty over time, teams need to constantly assess their progress, improve where they can, and make necessary changes when warranted. The NetEye R&D team is no exception. Back when NetEye was smaller, we wrote documentation when time allowed, typically after new features had already…

Read More
02. 10. 2018 Charles Callaway Documentation, NetEye, Unified Monitoring

Creating Action Shortcuts in your NetEye 4 Custom User Guide

In my last user guide blog I showed you how to create your own menu item, create a space on the file system, write a sample page, and store an image for that page, all in a way that will survive future updates.  This time I want to show you how to use your custom…

Read More

Archive