Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

May 2020

IoT Architecture: 3 Things Every IT Professional Should Know

OK, folks. Let’s be real for a moment and acknowledge that everybody, every professional, and definitely every vendor out there is tossing out the phrase “IoT” like flyers on the Las Vegas strip. As an industry, we tend to use IoT to describe a breadth of networked devices, most often headless—those without a user attached—such as cameras, door entry systems, and HVAC controls.

IT Risk Assessment vs. IT Risk Management: The Difference and What They Mean to the Service Desk

In life, risks can be perceived both negatively and positively. Taking a risk can sometimes yield great results, but other times, a risk is a yellow light of caution. For businesses in particular, if not managed properly, IT risks like malware malfunctions and employee errors can range in size and occur in several areas. The result is disruption and valuable time being used to resolve the issue. But even with risk present, there are measures IT can put in place to ward them off.

How to Monitor for Unauthorized Changes to Your Linux Packages With SCM

Packages keep your Linux servers up to date and running smoothly. Yet if someone tampers with the packages getting deployed to your server, you could have serious performance issues, expose your organization to harmful viruses, or open it up a new vulnerability. Keeping an eye out for what packages are deployed, the package sources, and how they're changed could help prevent or alert you to an issue. In this video, we'll show you how to gain visibility into your Linux packages and track how they're changing over time.

Improving Cybersecurity Starts at the Endpoints

Careful monitoring and attention to endpoints are just two elements of a strong cybersecurity strategy for K-12 districts. Cybersecurity must be a top priority for K-12 schools. Schools need to prioritize thwarting industrious hackers who are intent on getting to the treasure trove of information and personally identifiable information (PII) schools manage.

The Rise of the Machines: ITOM Meets Automation

I started in the IT industry in networking. I had a negative experience in high school trying to learn computer programming*, so I was relieved route/switch had much less to do with computer programming. With the rise of the machines, this isn’t the case anymore. Now in addition to learning router or switch operating systems, routing protocols, and overlay technologies, today’s savvy network engineer needs to throw in things like Python, Ansible, and Jinja.

Node.js Logging Guide-Best Tips and Tools to Use in 2020

When applications experience performance issues, developers may rely on heuristics and find the root cause of issues by directly looking into their code. However, in modern application environments, several services, third-party APIs, and cloud-based components can make it difficult to pinpoint the root cause of an issue. Application logs can help developers detect and resolve issues faster.

AppOptics Application Service Map

Announcing automatic dependency mapping in SolarWinds AppOptics When your team responds to a latency alert on a single service, how do they know how (or if) the increased latency in one service affects the end user? With the SolarWinds® AppOptics™ service map, teams can easily view the relationships between services, and see how (or if) a service is connected to the end user.

How to Effectively Monitor User Activity

Monitoring user activity on your website is a must if you want to run a successful and profitable online business. By implementing real user monitoring on your website, you can get an in-depth understanding of how your users are interacting with your website and the experience they receive. In this article, we discuss what real user monitoring (RUM) is and the benefits of using it. We’ll also share some best practices, so you’ll be ready to set up real user monitoring for your website.

5 Reasons Why You Should Invest in a Docker Logging Tool

Today, continuous development and continuous delivery have become the de facto mode of application development for businesses seeking higher agility. With the continuous push to achieve higher efficiency and reliability in running software operations, container technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos have become mainstream. Among these technologies, Docker is the most popular.

Best Database Monitoring Tools in 2020

You’re probably familiar with the phrase, “software is eating the world.” In the last couple of decades, the importance and pervasiveness of technology in our society and our lives reached levels past generations would consider the realm of science-fiction. You probably have in your pocket, right now, a computer way more powerful than the one in Apollo 11. With every passing year, humankind creates more information than in the rest of history, combined.

Cassandra Monitoring: 6 Best Practices to Pay Attention To

Apache Cassandra is an open-source, distributed database management system specifically built for organizations needing to handle large volumes of data, including when said data is spread across many commodity servers. Cassandra development began at Facebook but later became an open-source Apache project. Now, it’s widely used by some of the biggest enterprises, like Uber, Spotify, eBay, and smaller developer teams.

The Cost of NOT Monitoring Every Application

If you’ve been building or supporting applications for a while, you’ve probably experienced the uncomfortable postmortem meetings that inevitably follow significant service interruptions. You know how it works. There was a critical outage in one of your apps and it took the team an entire week to track down and fix the issue. Customers and revenue were lost. Now you’re sitting in a large conference room with executives to discuss what happened and why.

Putting ITIL 4 Into Practice With SolarWinds Service Desk - SolarWinds Lab Episode #87

ITIL 4 certifications demonstrate a thorough understanding of how to deliver value to the modern organization through services. Matching that understanding with the capabilities of your ITSM solution is a powerful combination. Join ITIL 4 Managing Professional Sean Sebring and ITSM Senior Sales Engineer Liz Beavers for a crash course on applying the seven guiding principles of ITIL 4 and how they tie into using the SolarWinds Service Desk platform. Whether you’re a certified ITIL pro or a new help desk technician hoping to work more efficiently, learn five ways to deliver better service to your organization.

Web Application Monitoring During a Crisis

In February, we wrote about how major live sporting events in March will impact online ordering and food delivery. We discussed the associated importance of monitoring your web app to ensure a smooth end-user experience and to troubleshoot issues like downtime, slow load times, and broken transaction flows. But unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know what happened. All the sports were cancelled. That’s right, no broadcasted games. No championships. No brackets.

How to Extract Actionable Intelligence With C# Logging

When applications are deployed in the production environment, developers expect them to work smoothly without any performance issues. However, applications often experience unexpected bottlenecks, making it crucial to monitor applications. One of the simplest ways to monitor a C# application is to emit, save, and index log data for search, analysis, and troubleshooting. We’ll discuss how you can monitor your applications while making the most of C# logging.

An Exploration of Runtime Metrics: Node's Event Loop

What Are Runtime Metrics? Runtime metrics can help us understand how an application is performing. SolarWinds® AppOptics™, a SaaS-based, full-stack infrastructure and application monitoring tool, now reports four categories of runtime metrics: CPU, memory, garbage collection times, and event loop times. Each metric category provides a view into how resources are used by an application.

The Expensive History of APM

When done well, application performance monitoring (APM) is a magical and irreplaceable tool. However, over the years, enterprises have sometimes paid dearly to implement it. APM’s task seems simple enough—replace emotional user anecdotes about application performance with quantifiable, actionable data. But the devil can certainly be in the details with APM.

Page Load Time vs. Response Time - What Is the Difference?

Page load time and response time are key metrics to monitor, and they can give you an in-depth understanding of how your website is performing. However, the difference between page load time and response time isn’t immediately obvious, and neither are the benefits of tracking them independently.

5 Benefits of Cloud-Based Log Aggregation Tools

In the modern digital ecosystem, every user activity, system error, application transaction, and network packet movement can be tracked using logs. This level of visibility into systems, networks, and applications is useful for troubleshooting bottlenecks, analyzing past trends, and predicting future events. However, monitoring various cloud-based and on-premises resources becomes complex in the absence of proper log aggregation tools.