Pressing my buttons in Texas: The importance of good monitoring.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily
A couple of months ago, KEYE-TV in Austin, Texas (where this blog is based) did a story on the Texas Legislature. That story found its way to YouTube and got to the front page of Reddit, which is where I heard about it.
In the Texas legislature, when it’s time to vote on a bill. Texas has an electronic voting system – Congressmen press one of three buttons on their desks to register a Yay, Nay, or Abstention, and that vote is shown on the electronic board at the front of the chamber.
What the video shows is that representatives – both Democrat and Republican – are actually voting more than once on bills. They rush around like it’s a free-for-all, pushing not only their own buttons but, it seems, as many of their colleagues’ buttons as well – voting up to four times on the same bill.
Rep. Debbie Riddle (R-Tomball) justified it as saying that since there’s no bathroom breaks or breaks for lunch, that it’s a matter of necessity – despite the fact that it’s clearly against the House’s own rules.
But the idea of politicians voting more than once on a bill came as a shock to many people – including myself. This is because, though the Lege, (as we call it here in Texas) is monitored on cable TV, the view changes and does not actually show the members voting when they do. It took a different type of monitor – the KEYE-TV crew – to actually show what’s really going on.
It’s a matter of deploying the right monitoring equipment in the right places at the right times – a matter of making sure you have the ability not only to view all of the information from end to end but to be able to drill down and see what’s going on with individual instances. This is why monitoring is so important.
Or rather, if you just looked at this from a “fault” perspective – those red and green lights in the Lege still lit up fine. If you didn’t actually see what happened when the legislators on the floor, you’d have no idea anything was amiss with the legislature’s performance.
Louis P. Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice, famously remarked: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
The same can be said of network monitoring – you need to know what’s happening on your network, otherwise things that look fine on the outside may actually be all screwed up.