Perfect is the enemy of good

Describing how "monitoring should work in a perfect world" helps people who are already doing it well, but puts off people who aren;t doing it at all. We get the problem of where do I start, how can I possibly build an integrated monitoring, alerting, paging solution that has all the bells and whistles. I work with Government departments, many of whom still regard the entire web with hostility, run systems on mainframes (one of which actually rusted away at one point), and believe the cloud is still hype. Telling them how to do DevOps, Monitoring, Agile, HTML5 etc perfectly is a waste of time. They often need to just get it started, with a simple nagios or pingdom check, enabling their lead developer to have even normal user access to the servers, or declassify the state secrets that might be the 10.x.x.x ip address. For the people I work with, the DevOps community continues to push the perfect solutions, how to do correctly, but we need to also remind people how to start from scratch.

(Somehow I'll turn that into an entertaining 5 minute rant/education to remind people that there are a lot of people who are still beginners and need advice to get started).