Speaker 1:
This episode of TechPod is brought to you by THWACK, the SolarWinds community with more than 150,000 members. The THWACK site has product forums, event listings, monthly missions, contests, and much, much more. There’s even a content exchange where members can share custom queries, scripts, templates, and reports with each other. To learn more, visit THWACK.solarwinds.com.
Ashley Adams:
Hello and welcome to another episode of SolarWinds TechPod. I am with my fellow host, as always, Sean Sebring.
Sean Sebring:
Hey Ashley, I’m THWACK … I’m happy to be here.
Ashley Adams:
Today we are celebrating all things THWACK. The SolarWinds online community is celebrating 20 years, and we are lucky enough to be joined by some former THWACK MVPs who are now esteemed SolarWinds employees and colleagues. I am pleased to welcome Kevin Sparenberg and Michael Kent. Michael, would you like to introduce yourself for us here?
Michael Kent:
Hi, Ashley. Hi, Sean. I’m five months into SolarWinds, but been a SolarWinds THWACK member since 2006 and an MVP since 2017 until I stopped being MVP when I joined SolarWinds.
Ashley Adams:
Excellent. And many of you are probably familiar with Kevin, but why don’t you give us an intro?
Kevin Sparenberg:
I feel like this is unnecessary, but I’ll do it anyway. So I am former customer, former THWACK MVP, former product manager, product marketing manager, and proud Solarian, and now a part of our community team here on THWACK. I joined THWACK in 2012, I believe. So this year will mark my 11th THWACK-iversary in December, and I was an MVP in 2014, I believe, and then got the fortunate or unfortunate call for our listeners that, “Would you like to come on to work for SolarWinds?” And I said, “Yeah, let’s do that,” so I now work on the community pretty much full-time. I am the one person, well me and a very small team to be honest, we are the people who actually get paid every day to spend all of our day on THWACK, which is amazing.
Sean Sebring:
So you’ve brought up THWACK a few times and we’ve discussed this in the past, but just in case for our listeners, since we’re at the start of the call, what is THWACK?
Kevin Sparenberg:
Well, I feel like this is a me question, so I’m just going to ahead and take it. So THWACK is, if we want the short version of this, THWACK is an online community created by SolarWinds to help our customers help themselves. This originally started 20 years ago now and it’s when SolarWinds was a very small company. I know everyone thinks SolarWinds is megalythic, humongous organization that’s global. No, it started as a very small mom and pop style software company in the central US and there were 30, 40 employees. And when we started selling software, it was really hard to handle all the support questions. And THWACK started initially as essentially a support forum. It was a place people could go in and then people could answer questions instead of sitting on hold all the time waiting for someone to pick up the phone. And it works, right?
But it kept growing and it turned into a place where people would ask questions that weren’t necessarily about our software. They would ask a question about how to configure an access control system of Pix 525 or how to set up router on a stick to learn stuff in a lab or how to get the proper server settings to do X, Y, or Z. And it’s just kept growing. We realized well before my time, but SolarWinds realized that it made more sense to let this be a proper IT community where people can ask questions and help each other out, not necessarily pushing product. Our products will help you solve these problems, but in the event that you just have this problem, how would you solve it?
That’s what it has evolved to today, 20 years later where it’s just a place to discuss technology. It’s a place where we have fun every month and we goof off. And honestly, the conversations are some of the funniest and most heartwarming I’ve seen in my career in IT, which is a really big help, especially for us who have spent a lot of time working in the dredges of the horrible parts of IT, actually being able to have a place where you have a little bit of an outlet and you’re surrounded by like-minded people is an absolute blessing.
Ashley Adams:
So would it be fair to say, because I feel like when I first joined that I thought of kind of a Reddit. THWACK is a SolarWinds Reddit feed almost, right?
Kevin Sparenberg:
It’s not a bad analogy. Funny part is we do have a Reddit and when you go there, people will try to answer questions and normally the second response is, “Hey OP, you probably should ask this question on THWACK,” because let’s be serious, we have, making up numbers 2,500, 3000 Solarians around the world. We’ve got 195,000 active members. There is zero way we are going to be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to answer questions. But somebody somewhere on this planet or maybe off planet, I don’t know what your life is, who’s on THWACK who could probably answer this question. Or at least, if not give you like the concrete answer, give you that aha idea to take your troubleshooting or your monitoring or your observability platform or whatever to that next step.
Sean Sebring:
I have a new goal. I want to respond to a THWACK post from space now. Thank you, Kevin.
Kevin Sparenberg:
Hey, as long as your latency is low, and you know what? You can monitor that with SolarWind solutions, you’ll be fine. Actually, I think there was a story about that where we actually used the software, I don’t know if it’s anecdotal or a true story that we actually used it to watch latency to the ISS.
Ashley Adams:
Does anyone know where the name THWACK came from? Where that got started?
Kevin Sparenberg:
Actually, I know where it came from and I know who came up with it.
Ashley Adams:
Okay, let’s hear it.
Kevin Sparenberg:
All right. So there is a frequent boomerang employee, a guy by the name of Denny LeCompte. If you’re not familiar with Denny. Denny has been at SolarWinds and then startups and then back at SolarWinds and other tech stuff and then SolarWinds. He’s basically one of those guys we bring in, not to fix problems, but he’s like an idea hamster. Basically, you give him a wheel and you put him on the wheel and just all of a sudden stuff starts coming out. He came up with this idea because in those days we were very much buying into this comic book feel of iconography for the community. The company itself was proper and professional, but the community was fun and lighthearted and we kind of leaned into this comic book, a superhero kind of idea, and they came up with this idea where they had to have a quote, and I’m not joking, “punchy name” for the online community.
And everybody went back to Batman ’66, the old Batman TV show where every time a fist would hit a face, it would be like, “Wham, bam,” and then all of a sudden one of them was, “Thwack.” And we said, “Yeah, sure, we’ll go with that.” And I’m fairly sure, this is completely fabricated in my mind, is that after we came up with the name, then we had to come up with the acronym for it, which I’m not going to tell here because it’ll spoil part of the special mission we have going on at THWACK right now.
Ashley Adams:
Oh, very cool. As a big Batman fan, I love this. I feel like I should have known where it came from, but that is fantastic to learn.
Sean Sebring:
It sounds like a backhand to me, right? A THWACK has got to be like a backhand.
Kevin Sparenberg:
It could have also been a broom hitting a vase. It doesn’t really matter.
Michael Kent:
I’m sure somewhere, one of the early bits of swag I’ve got, I’m sure I had an inflatable THWACK hammer, a giant inflatable THWACK hammer. Have I misremembered that, Kevin?
Kevin Sparenberg:
No, you have not misremembered that. And if I can take a small aside, the THWACK hammer has a very interesting story. It’s inflatable and I’m showing people, you can’t see this. It’s about two feet, about, I don’t know, whatever that is, 40 centimeter, and you inflate it, and when you hit it on things, it would go squeak.
Michael Kent:
Yeah, I definitely have one.
Kevin Sparenberg:
It was hilarious. And someone complained to us once, this is seven, eight years ago, complained to us once that they bought the THWACK hammer from the THWACK store and expected an actual hammer.
Ashley Adams:
Oh, no.
Kevin Sparenberg:
And we have a picture. It was very obviously balloon shaped, but sure, why not?
Ashley Adams:
We do not condone violence of any type here at SolarWinds.
Kevin Sparenberg:
No, no. But that’s why we chose a hammer because it’s constructive as opposed to an axe.
Ashley Adams:
That’s right. That’s right. So Michael, in talking to you before this episode, you had mentioned that becoming an MVP was something that you wanted to tick off your life bucket list. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Michael Kent:
It’s almost that. Becoming an MVP enabled me to tick something off my bucket list. So growing up in the UK, small family in social housing, going to the states was a bit of a dream, really. Hugely into American sports, so not long after being made an MVP THWACKcamp’s coming up and the MVPs got reached out to, “Hey, how would you guys feel about being flown over to Austin to the office while THWACKcamp is going ahead?” So for those that don’t know, THWACKcamp, an online event. Happens every year. So they were like, “Hey, do you want to fly over? We’ll pay.” So wow. Absolute dream. So Danielle was here at the time, I was like, “Right, how do we do these expenses? Yep, that’s all good.” I said, “Do you mind which way I fly? Which way I fly back?”
In our infinite wisdom, we’d timed THWACKcamp with the Austin Grand Prix, so flights from the UK, just couldn’t get one. So it was going to be stop over on the way and stop over on the way back. So on the way back, I was able to fly to Seattle, being a massive Seahawks fan, and started out as a Sonics fan, I was able to come back via Seattle. So in those 24 hours in Seattle, I did every touristy thing you could think possible. My itinerary, I literally ticked everything on my bucket list. But I was literally flying into Seattle, see, because you fly in over the Seahawk Stadium and I just burst into tears. I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve done it,” and that was a dream from being a teenager. And when an organization enables you to do that, it sticks. So if I wasn’t hooked when I became an MVP following that, that was it. It was always inevitable.
Kevin Sparenberg:
So we’re sorry, or?
Michael Kent:
No, no, no. I’ve said a few times where this is a new role that I do within SolarWinds. I’m a field-based solutions architect in the UK and I’ve been using the software for 15-ish years. I keep saying 15 years, keeps on being a bit longer than 15 years.
Kevin Sparenberg:
But when you say 20, that’s like a life commitment in IT so you never [inaudible 00:11:56].
Michael Kent:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Never want to say 20, but so SolarWinds, this role came up, which I chatted with Kevin about it and he was like, “This role is made for you.” So it, yeah, it did. It took 15 years, but we reached that point where SolarWinds was ready for me. I was ready for SolarWinds and I joined a role doing what I love to do every day.
Sean Sebring:
One of the things I liked that you mentioned on it is community. You mentioned being where you’re from, it’s smaller and of course coming over to the state side, things are bigger here. But what’s also huge, and Kevin mentioned this too, is the community. I love how much it impacted you individually, but something I think that we really need to just truly appreciate is the size of that community, the wealth of people, the wealth of different cultures. You’re across the pond from us, so there’s so much there in that community beyond just the tools and stuff. What else could you say the community means to you? Have you made friends there? Give us a little bit of that, ’cause I mean, you’re coming in new as part of SolarWinds now, but you’ve been in the community for quite some time.
Michael Kent:
The community’s kind of given me two things, and becoming an MVP even more so. We have a kind of separate Slack for all the MVPs and the MVPs are located around the world and as it is THWACK, so it doesn’t matter what time of day you put a question up, someone’s online to be able to respond to it. And being lifelong operational IT, quite often that’s 10:00 PM, 1:00 AM asking these questions, especially in the early days because the information wasn’t out there. So if it was a technical problem, it wasn’t necessarily about something within monitoring, it might just be, “Hey, how do I do this on my Cisco firewall?” And you could get a response really, really quickly. And so for me becoming an MVP, especially following coming out there with Austin, that MVP community is absolutely fantastic. We got people in Australia. Right way 24/7 there’ll be someone online.
Sean Sebring:
They really follow this community.
Michael Kent:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And these are the most passionate users that we’ve got. They live and breathe this stuff. So having come from there, often we can be a little critical, but that’s because we’re so passionate about it. But being passionate about the software and wanting to make it better, that’s how I became an MVP in the first place. It was the request came up on THWACK from the UX team, “Hey, we’re looking for people that use this other solution. Why can’t you use SAM, for example, for your monitoring?” And so it was literally doing a demo to the UX team of our other solution and how we used it and getting involved with that with the team inside SolarWinds. So it was great because we got that inside view. We chatted to PMs, we chatted to UX. We were absolutely kind of embedded in.
I mean, one of the things that I joke about when I joined SolarWinds, I had about 40 people to message once I joined saying, “Hey, I’ve joined,” in the internal team. So I knew that many people from just having interacted over the years.
Sean Sebring:
And then I have another question for you on this real quick because I think it’s important to note this. What you just ended on was a lot about SolarWinds and SolarWinds products, but something you’d said midway through there, and I think this is definitely worth noting, is that it’s an IT community, not just a SolarWinds customer community. And the way you were talking about almost being on call as part of this, just because you’re passionate about supporting others, not just the products themselves, but as an IT community, someone just has a question, how do I do this? And so it is its own community of people trying to help each other, IT professionals trying to help each other. It’s not exclusive to just SolarWinds, SolarWinds products. SolarWinds happens to facilitate it, but.
Michael Kent:
Yeah, I think I just did a presentation at the London SWUG and it was along these lines, how it changed my life. And I changed usernames midway through. So we found my earliest post of my current username and I was on there answering someone’s question around configuring RAID arrays and which RAID type was best. You remember a time when people bought service?
Ashley Adams:
And they bought spinning discs?
Michael Kent:
Yeah. And it was, “Hey, which RAID array should I try?” And I was like, “Well, it’s this or it’s this. These are the benefits of this, but here’s the link to the RAID configurator I use online to help me remember this gives me this much resiliency, redundancy. This will be faster, this will be slower.” And that was, yeah, 2015 account and I asked a question and I had a response within half an hour. Someone had replied and said, “Hey, [inaudible 00:17:07].” That’s crazy. It was absolutely fantastic. And yeah, it gets in your bones and like I said, I know people from all across the world because of that community.
Ashley Adams:
Well, I think something that we touched on in a previous episode in talking to Blythe Morrow about database is just how the mental health effects of IT sometimes. This is a topic that we like to raise more awareness about. It can be very isolating in moments, especially if you are one of those support functions where you’re working the midnight hours and you are a zombie during the day. Having that sense of community around you and understanding what makes other people’s jobs harder, being able to lean on each other, maybe vent to each other in some ways. Yeah. If either of you would like to expand on how that is a mental support system as well as just a technical support system.
Kevin Sparenberg:
Michael, I’m going to start on this one because I’ve got some anecdotal evidence from my history. So my very brief history, I started on a help desk, then went to network engineering and then up and beyond. On a help desk, help desk in larger organizations always followed the sun. They’re 24/7, 365, first, second, third shift, graveyard shift, if you want to call it that, what have you. I was second shift supervisor, but I was also the most technical savvy of everyone because I just had previous experience elsewhere that brought this up.
What that unfortunately meant was I was also the single point of failure. So when someone had a question about Outlook, meaning Exchange, or Blackberries, that’s how old this is. Or stuff like how Citrix works or how this particular client or how this thing or how that thing worked, then it was great because I was able to give this knowledge out, but it was also complete burnout so much to the point where I got called three Christmases in a row while sitting down with my family for dinner.
And I cannot find the post. I’m sure it exists. I went on a slight venting spree on THWACK about the pains of on-call and having your help desk people not follow their scripts and why can’t they do this? And I probably deleted it to be honest, because I’m fairly sure my boss found it and did not like the fact that I was kind of ranting about how the other people in my organization were not doing their job.
But yeah, there is just knowing other people are experiencing even if not the same, but something similar and being able, especially for young IT professionals who are … they’ve engaged their ADHD to the highest level and they are 100% on board. I’m willing to work every hour of every day, “5:00 PM is a joke, no one stops at 5:00 PM.” And they’re willing to put in all those extra hours, that’s great.
But by the time, if that’s when you’re 25, by the time you hit 30, you’re walking around like an old man with a cane because you’re just exhausted. Even if it’s not physically, it’s mentally exhausting to run on a level like that. And that’s something where a community of other people that do similar roles can kind of come around. You are not alone. I spoke recently about still having to this day imposter syndrome whenever I stand up in front of people, there is a lot of fear for me personally, and I can’t speak to anyone else that when I speak in front of people, I have the same kind of things that go through my head, “Why am I considered an authority on this? What happens if someone calls me out? Am I being a fraud? I’m just telling you what my opinion is, but I’m giving it like it’s gospel. What is all of …”
And that’s something that IT professionals have to deal with all the time because if we look at the history of IT, it has been isolating. It’s not intentional, but people specialize. There’s that group that is the specialists for networking. There is that group that is the specialist for servers. There is that group that’s the specialist for virtualization or storage or database or service desk or any of these things, and no fault of their own, they get siloed into this. And at some point you just want to rage against the machine and scream about it because the people on the other side of that silo wall have no idea what you’re talking about, but it makes perfect sense.
That’s where this idea of community where we don’t have these walls kind of really comes in. Everybody is, even if you’re not responsible for everyone else’s stuff, because you shouldn’t be, you’re still empathetic to them. You still have an understanding, you’re willing to walk maybe not 10 miles, maybe a mile in their shoes to understand what they’re going through.
Ashley Adams:
I absolutely love that. And I think something that you touched on reminded me, the imposter syndrome thing. With social media forums, having a little bit of anonymity can be a good and a bad thing. We’ve seen where it allows people to spread vitriol that’s maybe not at as positive, but we keep the THWACK community an extremely uplifting, positive space. And what’s kind of cool about it is that there’s people from all across the world, all kinds of racial backgrounds, men, women, sexual orientations, economic backgrounds, different levels in their career from fresh outs to VP and director level people. And it kind of sets that playing field for everybody to talk in an open way and share, which is a really beautiful thing.
Kevin Sparenberg:
Yeah, and it’s something that is … it’s not wholly unique to THWACK. I don’t want to give that misrepresentation. It’s not wholly unique, but it is a place where we seem to have collected a large amount, and maybe it’s me, maybe I’ve got rose-colored glasses. But it seems we’re very, very troll light. It seems there are varied people. They abide by our terms of service and our standards. It’s just something that if we see someone that’s a little trolly, we’ll kind of call them out, be like, “Come on, seriously?” And then they’ll acquiesce. And if not, well eventually something like that gets banned because it’s violation.
But we have to do that so incredibly rarely, I think three times in eight years that I’ve been working with it. So yeah, unless there is someone who is for one reason or another, being an absolute a-hole, there is very little chance you’re going to run into a problem because everyone there is there for the same thing. They want to do their jobs better and they want to help other people do their jobs better.
Sean Sebring:
Kevin, you’ve said a few things that resonate with me as a former IT operations guy. And being part of the community, sometimes I just feel like being a hero and I’m sick of answering the questions at my job, so let me answer someone else’s question. Also, just innately as being an Ops person, I’m kind of addicted to problem solving. So even if it has nothing to do with me and I don’t know the answer yet, I want to find it too. Not for you, but for me. And yeah, I’ll tell you when I find it. But part of that is as problem solvers, we’re addicted to solving the problems. Sometimes it’s fun to just go and hammer out tons of questions for someone else that you know the answer to, and it’s satisfying when it’s not your problem in the first place.
Kevin Sparenberg:
And also something you touched on, maybe avoiding your particular problem for a couple of minutes to give yourself that little mental break.
Sean Sebring:
Yeah. Yep.
Ashley Adams:
All right. We are going to pick this conversation up after a quick break.
Kevin Sparenberg:
Join the THWACK community in real life at a 100% in-person event in Charlotte, North Carolina. The SolarWinds User Group will be traveling on August 8th, 9th, so sign up now to get in early on all of the reservations. We even have a special hotel deal for you if you want to stay for both days. All the information can be found at SWUG.solarwinds.com/charlotte-2023 or THWACK.com/SWUG.
Ashley Adams:
Welcome back, everyone from the break. Very happy to continue this conversation on all things THWACK and the 20th anniversary. I would love to jump into maybe a little bit more on the technical side, the practicality of how IT users actually use the tool. So there’s an anecdote somebody wants to share or just ways that you’ve actually technically solved problems with THWACK.
Kevin Sparenberg:
Well, I can speak for me that it introduced me probably to everyone who is on THWACK’s detriment to how powerful scripting is in a production environment. I went back and found, no lie, my very first THWACK post many, many, many years ago, and it was something written, don’t hate me for this, in VB script because that was still a thing then. And that led me to further and further things. And for me, I think the best thing about THWACK is the 80 to 20.
And what I mean by that is you’re 80% sure you got something but you haven’t gotten it to exactly where you want. And that last 20% is the sticking for you. You’re like, I’ve got the output like this, but I need it to look like that. I’m getting the data, but this thing isn’t doing this. Or I’ve got this alert and it’s doing this thing, but it’s not doing this other part I really want. So you got the foundation, but you just have to pretty it up.
I’ve helped people do this with alerts, making alerts look pretty with HTML and CSS. I’ve done it with a bunch of scripting stuff. Now we’ve got the modern dashboards. These are things that I’ve got the data, it’s raw. And myself speaking from my very personal experiences, I can read raw data and be like, “Oh, I see the trends that are happening here.” My management has never appreciated me giving a big Excel file full overall numbers. They wanted in a prettier version. So for me, that 20% was always, “Hey, I’ve got this raw data, I need a way to present it to somebody else so they can see it and be like, ‘Got it, I understand what you’re talking about there.'”
So for me, a lot of the THWACK stuff is that kind of 80/20, and I spent my days trolling the same three or four forums when I was a customer. For me it was in the old legacy Orion module days. So I would spend days on NPM and SAM and NTA, and that was a majority of my time. And then obviously crawling through the content exchange, looking for reports that I didn’t have to build myself so I could just basically download and import them and not be spending the time working on those.
Michael Kent:
I think for me it was having done this three times, it’s joining an organization, you join this organization and hey, turns out their monitoring isn’t very good. So you say, “Get this SolarWinds Orion product, let’s have some modules.” And then for me it was starting on the network side. So everything NCM, config backups, just getting that baseline. So getting help from the forum around, how do I get to do this real time change detection? A critical feature within NCM, then just, let’s see, getting to that point of seeing what’s going on the network.
And I think again, at the time, content exchanges, as Kevin mentioned, pulling in compliance reports, doing all of those things. And then that led me in a similar way to, okay, how can we leverage some of the more complex tools? Can we now get Orion to do the config changes on the switches, on the edge routers? I was presenting at an event and one of my anecdotes is giving the overnight NOC a tool so that they could block specific IPs because we’re working for an ISP and black holing these specific IPs, that was where I learned the importance of validating input. Don’t just assume they know what they’re doing.
Kevin Sparenberg:
Don’t assume all IPs are created the same or formatted correctly.
Michael Kent:
So it wasn’t that, it was when they blocked /2 rather than /32 and blocked a core of the internet. That wasn’t such a good one. So give them the tool, but yeah. Once we’d fixed that, so many 3:00 AM, 4:00 AM phone calls are, “Hey, we’re getting this, this IP is doing something bad,” and the NOC guys could just go, “Hey, let’s just block it now and we’ll pick it up in the morning, look at it in a bit more detail.” But yeah, just assume that it’s up to no good, and certainly that then that took the SolarWinds out of the hands of the guys looking after the network, doing the day-to-day stuff when we can put it in the NOC, give it to the more genius staff, give them more things to do. Certainly enabling other parts of the business to use the tool. So that was where using some of those more advanced features, getting help on the THWACK forum, that certainly helped us to get more from the staff as well as stopping the phone calls at 3:00 AM.
Kevin Sparenberg:
Similar one actually, one of the tools I gave over to our help desk when I moved over to network engineering. So we had third party monitoring for unusual activity. In other words, malware, virus, that kind of stuff. Just basically trolling our security logs and that’s fine. And they would say, “Hey, this IP is acting funny,” and I essentially wrote them a tool backed by the SolarWinds content and said, all right, the monitoring team or the third party that’s monitoring the firewall logs for suspicious activity is only going to have the IP address. That’s all they’re going to have.
Take that IP address, put it into this little tool and hit go. It will give you what machine is assigned to that IP address, where it is in our infrastructure, what floor it is, in which office, those kinds of things because we had all that stored in SNMP, thankfully. It’ll tell you whether a phone is also plugged in there and give you a button to basically what we called quarantine the VLAN, and essentially take the access VLAN, not the voice VLAN, take the access VLAN and put it up to a non routable VLAN number.
And that way that computer is essentially off net, but the phone is still on net because we would also populate in that little tool the person’s phone number. So you could call them, be like, “Your computer is acting bad, we’ve got to send someone out to look at it and run a full virus sweep, maybe take it off the network. So you’re being blocked. Sorry, that’s what’s happening.” And I leveraged a whole bunch of stuff. It’s where I learned about the query language. I asked on THWACK. I’m like, “I’m trying to pull this information from this table and this table and this table and the database and these things,” and someone, and it was probably Brandon Shopp because he was my PM for a long time and just said, “Stop doing it that way, please do it this way,” and taught me about the SolarWinds query language and then the NCM side for flipping it over.
‘Cause it’s really easy in the user tracker tool to hit a button and turn a port off. But if you turn that port off, their phone also goes dead, which means you can’t contact the person to tell them what you’re doing. So basically wrote my own tooling around this to give all this information to our help desk so they could be empowered to do this. And I wouldn’t necessarily get calls at all hours or to take me away from something that was ultimately not my responsibility because in networking, I wasn’t responsible for the end user’s computers. That was an entirely different team, but they would almost, before this tooling came in, they would have to contact me. I would have to shut off the VLAN manually and then go and give the ticket, the incident back to the help desk, have them contact the local hands and the local hands take over. And this just kind of streamlined that took me out of it and freed up my time.
Sean Sebring:
Awesome. Michael, I had a question for you. You are with us now from a community post and that community post turned to a job opportunity. Can you tell us a little bit more about that specifically and then introduce us to what you’re doing now and there’s something specific I think you wanted to bring up about that.
Michael Kent:
I think for me, yeah, absolutely engaging with that community answer, as I mentioned earlier, engaging with that UX team, one of the skills I never really thought that I would get from being on THWACK was being able to present in public. I became an MVP, SolarWinds around 2016 introduced PerfStack, performance analysis feature app stack. And this was transformational for my organization. Seeing the infrastructure from back to front, absolutely fantastic. And I was on a session with the PM for SAM at the time and I was like, “This is fantastic. It’s going to transform our organization, it’s brilliant. I can see everything.” And he went, “I’ve got to talk about that, this upcoming SWUG in London, how do you fancy joining me on stage and talking to 200 people about this?” And I went, “What? You want me to do what?” Yeah, no, I’m a networking engineer. I want to hide in the dark and all of those things.
And he was like, “Don’t worry, I’ve done this a lot. We’ll help you through it. Lots of practice,” joined together and helped with it. And actually presentation went great, lots of fantastic feedback. Everyone really enjoyed it. It worked really well having a customer up there that was using this day to day. I was network-focused guy, he was interested in the servers. It went really, really well and I actually quite enjoyed it.
And then since then it’s just kind of carried on happening. But without that little nudge, because I was talking about it passionately when we were just on the call and he was like, “We can capture that. Let’s capture that and go and present it.” And again, we then using that tool, it makes you look good in organization. And I’m quite privileged that I’m a techie that can talk to people. I like managing people. That’s kind of moved me through my career in terms of getting me promoted. “Hey, you’ve sorted out the infrastructure, great, have the operations department. Become operations director. Now let’s sort out the service desk.” And that progressed through.
So it got to the point where I was a good all-around technical person and that could talk to people, which fundamentally is what a solutions architect does. I call it when we’re talking to our customers, it’s almost like therapy for geeks. I sit on with a customer and they tell me all their problems and hey, I’ve solved these problems most of the time in the past and I’m helping them and surprise, surprise the solution is SolarWinds’ observability platforms. But that was always my solution, so I have no problem saying that with a customer.
So for me it was, at any stage through my career there’s been a SolarWinds tool there doing it. I started out with the tool set when I was a field engineer going out visiting customers, just these are small businesses, there’s a switch buried somewhere and I’ve got to try and figure out what’s on a port. And that’s how it started, trying to figure out what was connected to a port with the port mapper from tool set. That was my tool. That was like, “Hey, this just helps me.” I go blind into a customer site and I can figure out where something is. So from that troubleshooting right through to running NOCs, needing to know what’s going on everywhere. And again, that’s what I talk to customers about every day.
Ashley Adams:
We have talked about a lot of really amazing emotional drivers for why THWACK has been such a benefit to the IT community. I know there’s a lot of laughs and a lot of fun with the THWACK community and I think you guys have a couple fun stories to share. I know D&D was mentioned and a few other things. So why don’t you regale us with some silly stories from your THWACK days?
Kevin Sparenberg:
Well, Michael already mentioned what I jokingly refer to as the THWACKcamp THWACK MVP symposia of 2017, which is when we invited the THWACK MVPs from around the world to join us for THWACKcamp. Again, THWACKcamp is a virtual event. A lot of it is pre-recorded just because we want to make sure the demos go clean and everyone, we can meet timings. Let’s be serious, we don’t want to ramble on for two hours, but there’s a lot of live stuff interspersed with that. But we brought all the MVPs in and basically had micro sessions with them, and Crystal was in the room, now Solarian. Michael was there. I was there. I was already a Solarian for a while. I was one of the product managers for the online demo at the time. And I think it was my second or third THWACKcamp actually having content in.
So for some of the sessions I could be in room with the MVPs, for the other ones, I had to run down to the studio and do stuff. But we flew everyone in because of the time zone changes for many, many MVPs because I think only 60% of the MVPs I’m guessing right now are in the states and the rest are abroad somewhere. So there was a significant time difference for a lot of people who were traveling in. We flew them all in early to make sure they could at least have one decent night’s sleep. And I tried to come up with something fun to do because I was also relatively new to Austin, and I knew the MVPs for three or four years, easy by then. But I didn’t know everyone at SolarWinds and I probably never will. It’s a big company.
But I knew these people. I’d interacted with them more tightly in more of a fun way. And I was getting back into Dungeons and Dragons at the time, which if we’re all honest with ourselves, if you’re into it, you never really get out of it. But I digress. And I said, “Well, why don’t we run a campaign the night before and we’ll have some people bring up some board games and we’ll just steal one of the conference rooms,” and whatever. And my wife heard about this and y’all can’t see me pinching the bridge of my nose remembering this. My wife heard about this little shtick and said, “We need to make this memorable. And went out and bought all these decorations that we put out and we wrapped the door in, made it look like a castle gate. And we had hats and buttons and dumb crap all over the place.
And there are pictures of us playing D&D for it felt like hours. We literally got back to the office 5:00 PM, as soon as the office is beginning to shut down, we steal this conference room. We played till like 11, 12 o’clock at night and there’s like 14 of us around the table. Half of them have never played before. I’m at one end trying to run the game. Leon Adato is still sitting there, who, Leon is still one of my best friends to this day. And he’s wearing a chainmail yarmulke because it’s D&D and therefore you must have chain mail and chainmail yarmulke. I asked him at that point, if that’s the name of his rock band, and he started laughing. But we just had an absolutely great time. We just brought in snacks.
And then after THWACKcamp actually ran, we went to a local restaurant, a place called Rocco’s, which sadly has since shut down because Rocco and his wife retired. So that’s a good thing. And I think they were supposed to close at 8:00 PM, 8:00 PM or 9:00 PM. But Rocco was there and we were just joking with him. And my wife is Italian, Rocco name like that, of course Italian. And they started having this bickering contest about Italian things. But we had some of the most fun conversations and some of the funniest conversations. And then I can’t remember, I think it was day two, Michael, correct me if I’m wrong. We made Kelly cry, so that sounds bad. It was good cry. So can you just try to explain.
Sean Sebring:
You had me there for a second.
Kevin Sparenberg:
Wait.
Michael Kent:
Yeah, so all the MVPs at the time, we’d all had lots of sessions with the UX team. That was a big part of that community. So you’d go on a call with the UX team and they’d be like, “Hey, here’s this feature that’s in the release candidate. What do you expect it to do? What do you expect this to do next? Is this the right color? All of these questions.
Kevin Sparenberg:
How does this button make you feel?
Michael Kent:
Yeah. Those kind of things. So there was always these questions that UX team would ask. So unbeknownst to the staffer, SolarWinds, Tom, one of the MVPs said, “Hey, I’m going to get these t-shirts made up.” So about halfway through day two, because we were going to go out for the evening with all of the UX team, they were all gathering in. And so we kind of timed it. So the UX team came in the room and we all took our other top off and we were all wearing these THWACKcamp 2017 UX team T-shirts, all of the MVPs with all these bingo questions on the back of the T-shirt of all of these questions that we’d all been asked so many times and the UX team just couldn’t believe it. And that was a special partnership. And you’re just, Kelly just burst into tears.
Kevin Sparenberg:
It’s one of the ways that you become an MVP, and we probably haven’t covered it very much. But to become a THWACK MVP, it’s nothing about your customer size, it’s nothing about your environment size. It’s contributing to the community. It’s, what have you done on THACK? It’s less of a SolarWinds program and more of a THWACK program. What have you done, what good have you put out on THWACK? And two of the major things in your favor to become a THWACK MVP is participating in user experience, UX sessions, and also running the betas and the RCs and giving feedback early and quick and often. And it’s just something that it helps the community as a whole because you’re helping us make the best experience possible for the other 200,000 people that are out there. And that’s you sacrificing your time. And we recognize that by nominating people for THWACK MVP each year.
Michael Kent:
So I think for me, that aligns with joining SolarWinds. I’ve joined this solution engineering team and there’s an onboarding program, and one of the first things on the list is, “Hey, you’ve got to install this thing called MBM.” And I said to my boss, “What? For the hundredth time?” Maybe even more than that, the amount of times going through testing every beta we could get our hands on to literally, I’ve had a computer at home four years just to test this stuff because I was passionate about it because it was helping me day to day.
So yeah, the personal time put in, but for me, I’m sat here on the other side, now it’s paid off. So it’s that all those extra hours were worth it. But yeah, going back to that THWACK Camp, we did a lot of video content at the time and SolarWinds had this role, which was Head Geek. I mean, wow, you can go and just be Head Geek and make videos and just do this really cool stuff. That was quite, quite something. And there’s this big organization in the US. And then cut to I’m sat playing D&D with that guy that I’ve watched the videos with. Watched on the … it was really, really surreal.
Ashley Adams:
All right, well thank you both for being such amazing contributors to not only the THWACK community and SolarWinds, but this TechPod episode. We would love to wrap up with a few rapid fire questions. It’s a fun little game that helps us add a little color to your personalities. So we will kick it off. I think we’ll ask each of you a series here and the first one is, Michael, would you rather travel to the past or the future?
Michael Kent:
The future. I want my Back to the Future flying car.
Ashley Adams:
Perfect.
Kevin Sparenberg:
Probably the past actually, because all of my hobbies, aside from motorcycling are traditional archery and woodworking and blacksmithing. So for me, probably the past.
Sean Sebring:
If it were an option, Michael, would you live in a city in space?
Michael Kent:
No, I need to be able to go outside. I am an outdoors person. I’ve got to be able to go outside.
Sean Sebring:
Okay, fantastic. And I know Kevin also needs to be outside given those hobbies, but would you live in a city in space?
Kevin Sparenberg:
I would live alone in space. Sometimes humans are the worst.
Ashley Adams:
When Sean asked me, there was a time he was like, “If it could be a vacation.” I was like, “Oh yeah.” If I have to subscribe the rest of my life to it, I don’t know. But yeah. But time limits help. All right. Last one Kevin, we’ll let you start this one. What is your favorite tech invention?
Kevin Sparenberg:
Micro board computers, Raspberry Pis. Without a doubt I have way too many of them and I do the goofiest crap with them.
Ashley Adams:
All right. Michael, let us know. What’s your favorite tech invention?
Michael Kent:
Mine’s software. It is Microsoft Word and Spellchecker. I would not have my career without it. As someone that can’t write at all, Word and Spellchecker changed my life.
Ashley Adams:
Michael and Kevin, thank you for joining us and sharing today.
Kevin Sparenberg:
Thank you so very much for having us.
Michael Kent:
Thank you very much.
Ashley Adams:
Thank you for joining us on SolarWinds TechPod. I’m your host, Ashley Adams, joined by Sean Sebring. If you haven’t yet, make sure to subscribe and follow for more TechPod content. Thanks for tuning in.
