Microsoft Ignite Recap

Last week was the inaugural Microsoft Ignite conference, or as I like to call it: Microsoft TechEd R2. It took place in Chicago and I was fortunate enough to have my company (SolarWinds) send me to work our booth on the exhibit hall floor. I won’t bother you with a review on what Microsoft needs to do better with next year, as that’s been done already. Instead, I am going to focus on the two things that stood out to me as the most positive.

First, Ignite came on the heels of Microsoft Build. And at both events Microsoft unleashed a wave of announcements that shows this is a much different Microsoft than even 18 months ago. I think this tweet summarizes how all of us feel about Microsoft right now.

Those of us who really pay attention to what Microsoft is doing these days are literally giddy with excitement. #newmicrosoft #moretocome

— Gabor Fari (@GaborFari) May 7, 2015

You can find long lists of the announcements at both events, I’m not going to detail them again for you here. Let’s just say that for two straight weeks Microsoft was on top of the headlines and everyone else is playing catch-up right now. The developers are in charge of Microsoft again, and that makes me smile.

Second, the Power BI dashboard that SQL Sentry has put into their product. I’ve been clamoring for YEARS to get something similar into database monitoring products. Now that someone else has taken the plunge maybe we will see other companies invest in such efforts. The native reporting tools and structures in many applications is less than useful. I’ve no idea why any company spends so much time on trying to build the perfect reporting solution when all anyone wants to do is export data to a CSV files and pull it into Excel anyway.

The PowerBI dashboard is going to deliver great insights but remember this is BI. That means it is only going to tell you how you got to where you are. If you want to know what actions to take, that’s where you need to do some analytics. And that’s the 2nd generation of self-service reporting I want to see monitoring tools provide. I want a tool that can take all of the events from the past and then perform some predictive analytics. Imagine the power in being 95% confident that next Tuesday you would see a parameter sniffing problem?

That’s light-years ahead of the native reporting many tools offer today. And that’s why the Power BI dashboard was one of the coolest things I found at Ignite last week.

Ignite event also marked the first time I’ve given an in-booth presentation. I liked the format, and it struck me as being similar to a lightening talk (something I’ve also not done yet). I’ll do a separate blog post about that talk, hopefully later this week.

Lastly, here’s a group shot of the most amazing booth staff I have ever had the opportunity to work with. I have a dream job because these people are so wonderful to work with.