Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

November 2020

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IT Life Hacks for Monitoring

Nov 30, 2020 By Leon Adato In SolarWinds
Of all the different sets of hacks IT pros pick up, monitoring may be the most wide-ranging area and therefore the hardest to nail down in a single blog. After all, how many network hack techniques are equally valid here? And therein lies the actual secret—the IT life hacks collected by monitoring experts have little to do with a specific technology or silo and much more to do with the philosophy and discipline of monitoring itself.
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COVID-19 Pushes Schools to Their Limit, and the Cloud Shows Its Worth

Nov 30, 2020 By Jim Hansen In SolarWinds
For educators, students, and parents, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on learning has been profound. Thousands of schools across the U.S. closed their doors this spring and made the shift to distance learning. It’s a model many weren’t prepared for. And with schools in full swing and the pandemic continuing, educators, administrators, school staff, and school district boards struggle with the right path forward.
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A Developer's Perspective on Distributed SaaS Database Monitoring

Nov 25, 2020 By SolarWinds In SolarWinds
While application performance monitoring can provide us with metrics on software use and delays, SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor (DPM) was built to tell us stories as to why user behavior is the way it is in the database. Database performance monitoring for developers in the distributed cloud industry is an important practice for maintaining the best environment for your users.
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10 Automated Service Desk Workflows We're Thankful for in 2020

Nov 24, 2020 By Jessicah Raynor In SolarWinds
Thanksgiving is just a couple days away for folks celebrating in the US, so what better time than now to share what we’re thankful for? Many of us are giving thanks for loved ones, health, a roof over our heads, and full bellies. We’re also paying homage to the unsung IT heroes and service providers in our organization who make our jobs easier—especially amid the unanticipated shift to remote work this year.
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The Importance of Hardware Health Monitoring

Nov 23, 2020 By Brandon Shopp In SolarWinds
A networking problem can come from almost any fault within the infrastructure, whether it’s a bandwidth bottleneck, configuration issues, or a faulty networking component. But more than half of IT system outages are caused by hardware failure. The ability to quickly identify and resolve hardware issues goes a long way toward ensuring optimized performance. While this may seem like a simple solution, there are many, many potential hardware failure points, each of which can contribute to a slowdown.
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Postapocalyptic Networks

Nov 20, 2020 By Sascha Giese In SolarWinds
Just imagine the current situation continues well into the foreseeable future—let’s merge reality with a little fiction. The apocalypse is over, but life has changed permanently. This means we’re going to wear masks in public transport, shops, and restaurants and follow sports events on television instead of in the stadium. But hey, beer is much cheaper at home anyway. Office jobs are outsourced, but not into countries with cheap labor—they’re outsourced to our own homes.
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Web Performance: Two Truths and a Lie

Nov 20, 2020 By Pingdom In SolarWinds
While marketing has done its job of getting prospects and customers to your site, the last thing you need is a performance issue to turn them away. If your site is unavailable or there’s an issue with critical transactions, you’re preventing customers from purchasing, using, or logging in to your product. Especially during the holidays and peak shopping season, when the expectations are high, you cannot afford downtime.
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How ITIL 4 Guiding Principles Can Boost Communication in Our WFH Reality

Nov 19, 2020 By Chris Greer In SolarWinds
ITIL has established itself as the gold standard of guidelines for service management over the years. And with so many employees working remotely this year as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the best practices and guiding principles of ITIL 4 are arguably more applicable than ever. The sudden shift to remote work for many organizations has forced teams to increasingly rely on technology and find new ways to convey important messages.
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SolarWinds Launches New Automation Cookbook to Help MSP Partners Advance Services Control, Simplicity, and Cost Effectiveness

Nov 18, 2020 By SolarWinds In SolarWinds
Collection of Hundreds of Fully Vetted Scripts Help Eliminate Repetitiveness and Speed Up Technician Tasks-So MSPs Can Focus More "on" the Business Instead of "in" It.
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Finding Zen - How IT Ops and IT Security Can Work Together

Nov 17, 2020 By SolarWinds In SolarWinds
It's no secret IT Ops and Security teams don't have the most glowing relationship. The simplistic reason is while Ops is responsible for making work and communication as seamless and accessible as possible (and therefore wants everything open), Security is focused on making it as difficult as possible for the wrong people to get inside (and therefore wants everything closed). But beyond the trite hot takes, fundamentally, both teams want to keep the bad guys out without stifling productivity. And when these two groups work together—Well, it’s magic. Timothy Brown, SolarWinds VP of Security, is here to tell you how to reduce friction with some advice and real-world examples.
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The Technology Companies Think They Can Live Without (and Why They're Wrong)

Nov 17, 2020 By Leon Adato In SolarWinds
When the value is obvious, most companies are willing to invest in tools to help employees get their job done better. But over the course of my career, I’ve noticed a few blind spots companies can’t seem to remember when writing out their tech team grocery list. These include things obvious to many, like training, antivirus for all devices, and comprehensive content management; or the more subtle ones like password managers or (yes) monitoring.
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Winning On Tomorrow's Interconnected Battlefields

Nov 16, 2020 By Brandon Shopp In SolarWinds
With the U.S. national security plan highlighting the need for both information dominance and protection, the Department of Defense is considering plans like modernizing military networks to ensure more effective communications between warfighters and allies in the harshest of environments and recruiting the specialized talent required for battlefield domination. To begin, the DoD must bridge the gap between its ambitious vision and the capabilities of current military networks.
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7 Ways Cloud-Based ITSM Solutions Can Make IT Support a Breeze

Nov 12, 2020 By Tim Lawes In SolarWinds
Moving to the cloud is one of the most critical trends in digital transformation. Gartner even predicts that by 2022, 90% of companies will be using cloud services. As cloud adoption becomes more prevalent, let’s take a look at why the cloud pairs so well with IT service management (ITSM).
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What Is an IT Service Desk?

Nov 10, 2020 By Jessicah Raynor In SolarWinds
Let’s say you’re shopping in a retail store. You have everything on your shopping list except for one item. You’ve browsed through each of the aisles (twice), and you still can’t find what you’re looking for. What do you do? You’ll most likely go to the service desk. There, an associate can direct you to the aisle and shelf of where the item is. This is exactly how the IT service desk works for internal employees throughout an organization.
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Top 6 Infrastructure Monitoring Tools

Nov 10, 2020 By SolarWinds In SolarWinds
As networked environments continue to become larger, more global, and more distributed, many organizations have higher benchmarks for what they expect from their IT infrastructure. Companies want systems capable of adapting to hardware changes, support machine virtualization, and run applications across disparate data centers. But to ensure these complex IT environments are healthy, companies need infrastructure monitoring tools with visibility into key performance metrics.
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Monitoring 101: The Fundamental Concepts of System Monitoring

Nov 9, 2020 By Craig McDonald In SolarWinds
The answer to troubleshooting network challenges lies in effectively monitoring your environment. But saying “let’s monitor our network” presumes you know what you should be looking for, how to find it, and how to get it without affecting the system you’re monitoring. You’re also expected to know where to store the values, what thresholds indicate a problem situation, and how to let people know about a problem in a timely fashion.
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Determining the Most Important Application Availability and Performance Signals

Nov 6, 2020 By Dave Wagner In SolarWinds
There’s a time-tested saying in IT: zero sensors, zero incidents. What goes unmeasured goes unmaintained, unmanaged, and ultimately unprotected. But measurement is no simple thing. What IT teams measure depends on who needs the info and what they need to do with it, so what should be measured? In almost all circumstances, results will have to be filtered, analyzed, and summarized in some fashion.
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Level Up Your IT Asset Management Strategy

Nov 5, 2020 By Liz Beavers In SolarWinds
Whether you’re supporting remote teams or working in a hybrid environment, IT asset management (ITAM) is a critical practice to the business and your service management strategy. If you’ve been following our ITAM series and are delivering services to employees, you most likely have an understanding of the ITAM essentials and questions to keep in mind when developing a strategy. Now in this blog, I’ll guide you on the journey to take your strategy to the next level.
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What Is IT Asset Management?

Nov 3, 2020 By Jessicah Raynor In SolarWinds
Depending on the business, there’s a myriad of IT assets to keep track of and doing it manually can be taxing. An IT asset management system allows IT pros to monitor all the hardware and software introduced into the business and when those assets exit. When a service desk has details on each IT asset, where it resides, and its owner, IT pros can provide continuity of service and better manage service costs. IT assets can be physical, digital, software, and in the cloud.
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Five Steps to Developing an Application Modernization Strategy

Nov 2, 2020 By Jim Hansen In SolarWinds
Supporting legacy applications is problematic for several reasons. These aging systems are becoming increasingly obsolete and difficult to maintain. They use outdated software languages and unsupported hardware parts—some as much as 50 years old. As they age, they introduce cybersecurity risk and are less effective at accomplishing their intended purpose. While achieving application modernization isn’t without its challenges, the benefits are considerable.
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