As I've mentioned before, I'm a database guy by trade.  So in this age of incredible stores of deep, rich data about almost everything you could ever want, I constantly amazed at how little we actually use the information available to us.  Generally speaking, the data is used for a brief, specific purpose then never looked at again (although we continue to keep it *just in case*).  So what we end up with is huge stores housing anything from performance to traffic metrics to events to availability and reliability data and wasted opportunity.  Literally terabytes of data (in our environment alone) sit patiently waiting for some enterprising soul to take advantage of it.  Now in defense of most of the people asking to keep this stuff around, they don't actually know what to do with it beyond the scope of their immediate need. 

Now call me a glutton for punishment, but this is where I (and several members of my team) am choosing to spend a great deal of time.   We're still in the early phases of determining how best to make huge datasets of disparate data meaningful and interesting to those who may not necessarily know all of the questions they want to ask, but we have some very cool ideas on how we are going to approach the problem.  Stay tuned...we'll keep you posted!

Scott (no pseudonym necessary)

"There is no box"