GigaOm’s Structure Conference took center stage today and lots of interesting stories are coming down the pipeline. Here are today’s top picks:

Normally, I try to avoid reading business books. I especially avoid those promoting the secret sauce to building great companies. I figure the folks who actually do the building often tend to be too busy working, or otherwise enjoying the fruits of their labors instead of writing books. Plus, there are no shortcuts into building enduring companies, regardless of what we might see occasionally in the tech sector.

A few months ago I found myself at a bookstore and ended up buying a book called Good to Great. It’s actually a decent book, particularly because it is based on actual research.

One of the central elements of the book deals with the task of making sure you have the right team in place (”Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus”). We’ve …

I just saw that Atlassian, the provider of the essential community tools like Confluence wiki and JIRA ticket system, updated their wiki on the importance of monitoring the “lifeblood of your organization”.

They even outline the important monitoring tasks you need, and stress that it will help when dealing with their own world class support.

Monitoring involves a number of essential tasks, including those listed below:

• Monitoring log files.
• Checking for HTTP-availability and performance (e.g. by getting the same page every five minutes and displaying the time on a graph).
• Looking at many different parameters such as load, connections, IO, database-trends, and so …

The built-in HQ database is PostgreSQL. Recently, users have been discovering PostgreSQL has a certain limitation: it will not execute more than 2 billion transactions between vacuums. In rare cases, an HQ built-in database can get into this state.

If this happens, the database will stop accepting connections and HQ, which needs a data store, will obviously cease to operate properly. The immediate symptom will be that users will not be able to log in to HQ and the message displayed on the screen will be The backend datasource is unavailable.

That error is not enough to say for sure that the problem is PostgreSQL avoiding wraparound failure by not accepting connections. A quick look at the hqdb.log can confirm. The telltale log entries look like this:

FATAL: database is not accepting commands to avoid wraparound data loss in database "postgres"
HINT: Stop the postmaster and …

Normally I don’t make a point of calling out other vendors by name, but this time I can’t resist. See, Oracle’s big party-turned-conference is this week. “Larry-fest” — I’ve heard it called by some cynics. I believe the tagline is something to the effect of “100,000 reasons to say thank you.” Thank you indeed, Oracle. Thanks for closing down a whole frickin street 3 WHOLE DAYS BEFORE your database love fest and creating 4 more extra days of traffic. Lucky for us, Hyperic is a few blocks away and gets to enjoy the fruits of Oracle’s closure of …

In the spirit (pun intended) of Halloween, Hyperic sponsored a Nightmare on Web Street contest, where folks were encouraged to tell their grim tales of IT woe for a chance at trick-or-treating for a Wii! The day has come, and the contest winner has been selected. Without further ado, I would like to congratulate “Mr Anderson” for his nightmarish tale of servers and HTML. Here’s the winning entry folks:

Oh by the way, your websites will no longer be hosted in 4 days

In spring of 2002 I was called in by a Company to help them with their websites (I wasn’t an employee at that time, I had a small shop of about 10 guys doing web development/business systems).

The issue? Their Host went bankrupt and they had 4 days to move 100+ sites with 50+ pages each off their servers before the plug was pulled.

If this didn’t go …

Released today, administrators of the Alfresco Enterprise Content Management System now have access to a fully supported, enterprise-ready systems management solution with Hyperic HQ for Alfresco. The new Hyperic HQ plugin instantly enables HQ and Alfresco administrators to take full advantage of Hyperic?s powerful management capabilities, including auto-discovery, monitoring, complex alerting and remediation. With today’s release of the Hyperic HQ for Alfresco plugin, Hyperic HQ becomes the only monitoring system to natively support Alfresco deployments on every platform and architecture.

Enterprise Content Management ensures the quick and reliable delivery, accessibility and long-term control of the most important information assets in an enterprise. These all require a strong, reliable architecture,? said John Newton, CTO and co-founder of Alfresco Software Inc. ?Hyperic HQ?s plug …