Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

March 2021

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Integrating Logging into CI/CD

Mar 31, 2021 By Loggly Team In SolarWinds
In my experience, pipeline monitoring and management is traditionally either left for the last developer who deployed, or unmonitored entirely. This lack of centralized monitoring and production-level resiliency can lead to significant development delays or even bring pipeline and train deliveries to a grinding halt. But we can do better.
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SQL Server Problems? Try These Tips First

Mar 31, 2021 By Jason Hall In SolarWinds
When SQL Server is having performance issues, giving you error messages, or just running slowly, you need to figure out the root cause of the problem before making any changes. Don’t jump to conclusions—make sure you get a big-picture view of the issue. Start with these five troubleshooting tips to optimize your SQL Server performance.
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Leveraging APM to Conquer Custom App Management Troubles

Mar 30, 2021 By Melanie Achard In SolarWinds
Though you might use custom-made apps for many reasons, there’s only one reason you deploy them: off-the-shelf solutions just can’t get the job done. Whenever operations are too complex for a commercial application already in place or whenever a new kind of digital business is launched, a custom app is necessary. This is true no matter what the business model is.
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How Eliminating Network Choke Points Can Help the DoD Plan for the Next Wave of the Pandemic

Mar 29, 2021 By Brandon Shopp In SolarWinds
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, military IT leaders raced to expand network capacity and upgrade infrastructure to ensure it could meet their mission-critical workloads and support telework. Their successful efforts have established a proof of their own abilities to adapt and scale their networks with speed and agility. As more DoD personnel telework and government and home networks are pushed to the max, here are three things they must consider as plans for the impact on IT systems.
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IT Spring Cleaning: Making the best of the current situation

Mar 26, 2021 By Sascha Giese, Head Geek In SolarWinds
Spring is just around the corner. And since we're at home a lot right now due to the coronavirus pandemic, it's all the more worthwhile to take some time for spring cleaning. But it's not just in our own four walls that the winter grumpiness should disappear; the IT landscape is also in need of a digital spring cleaning.
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Best 7 Automated Network Diagram Software + Guide

Mar 26, 2021 By SolarWinds In SolarWinds
For your business’s network to thrive, you have to really know its details and intricacies. One of the best ways to understand your network is to make a network diagram, which is a visual representation of your network’s devices and how they connect to one another. You can manually create your own network diagram, which can help visualize complex networks. However, it can be difficult and time-consuming to build a coherent, accurate network diagram on your own.
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The End of Automation Anxiety

Mar 25, 2021 By Chrystal Taylor, Head Geek In SolarWinds
If there's one thing 2020 has highlighted, it's that the world is constantly changing. For most industries-IT included-one constant spans the ages: a lingering concern about automation. The very thing that helped pave the foundations for the industrial revolution and the world we know today has been a concern ever since, with the worry machines will take our jobs in one way or another. In 2021, we're likely to see the IT industry address this anxiety, embracing automation software solutions in a smarter way and freeing up tech professionals to prioritize the most important jobs.
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Key Challenges of Database Cloud Migration

Mar 25, 2021 By Kevin Kline In SolarWinds
As we shift enterprise computing to the cloud, the need for database migration increases—but with this comes the inherent challenges of migration and the need to plan. Moving to the cloud can come with more risks and obstacles than migrating a database within a data center or from one on-premises data center to another. If a business isn’t fully prepared to migrate, they’re almost certain to run into issues.
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Creating Custom Event Views in SQL Sentry

Mar 24, 2021 By Dexter Cox In SolarWinds
If you’re using SQL Sentry regularly, there’s a great event management feature that provides a lot of value for our advanced users. I often find the SQL Sentry Event Calendar isn’t being used as often as it once was. The Event Calendar lets you view historical and future events, drill down into event failures, and reschedule jobs using drag and drop all from within the SQL Sentry desktop client. In addition, you can create custom views of events you need to reference frequently.
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It's Never Too Late to Improve Your Personal Security Posture

Mar 24, 2021 By Chrystal Taylor In SolarWinds
Security is everyone’s responsibility. That’s it. That’s the whole point. (I may be spending too much time with Leon, but it had to be said.) If you have a security team, or even just one person who is tasked with security, it’s easy for the rest of the team or department to fall into a trap, thinking there’s nothing more you need to do. You’re wrong.
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Enterprise IT Cost Containment-A Series

Mar 23, 2021 By Leon Adato In SolarWinds
H.L. Mencken once famously wrote, “…there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.” More than just a pithy way to frame the entire concept of “cost containment” (whether network-specific cost, the broader category of IT, or the cost of anything else, to be quite honest), it’s an integral aspect of what I’ll be proposing in this and subsequent articles in this series.
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Aggregating Application Logs From EKS on Fargate

Mar 22, 2021 By Jillian Rowe In SolarWinds
Today we’re going to talk about logging with Kubernetes on AWS using CloudWatch and SolarWinds® Papertrail™. We’ll cover setting up Papertrail, installing and configuring the rKubeLog package, viewing the logs in the Papertrail event viewer, and cross-checking those logs with the ones we see with kubectl. From there, we’ll set up a few different alerts.
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What Does Server Monitoring Mean in 2021? A Look at Modern Server Options and How to Monitor Them

Mar 22, 2021 By AppOptics In SolarWinds
A few years ago, monitoring was simple. We had all our servers somewhere in the data center; we just had to install a monitoring tool and gather all the data from every server. Things changed when we started moving to the cloud and then to containers. Today, we often need to monitor a variety of different sources. A “server” can be a physical machine, virtual machine, container, or even a serverless application. Therefore, our approach for monitoring needs to change.
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Building Service Strength in a Unified ITSM Platform

Mar 22, 2021 By Liz Beavers In SolarWinds
Heading to the gym, you have access to so many amenities in one place: cardio equipment, private studios, a pool, free-weight area, a basketball court. Imagine if those conveniences were located at separate facilities, forcing you to have separate memberships and make different trips to achieve a well-rounded workout – it doesn't bode for the best experience. In a different context, think about your employees' experience as they search for answers across multiple platforms for service providers.
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Secure by Design | Securing the Software Development Build Environment

Mar 18, 2021 By SolarWinds In SolarWinds
The recent SUNBURST cyberattack on the SolarWinds software build environment is a concerning new reality for the software industry, representing the increasingly sophisticated actions by outside nation-states on the supply chains and infrastructure on which we all rely. SolarWinds is committed to sharing our learnings about this attack broadly given the common development practices in the industry and our belief that transparency and cooperation are our best tools to help prevent and protect against future attacks.
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Is Your Home Built to Last? Investing in Cloud-Based ITSM for a More Secure Tomorrow

Mar 18, 2021 By Liz Beavers In SolarWinds
Buying a home requires thoughtful planning and takes a significant amount of time and resources. Beyond your list of must-haves, you’ve likely kept tabs on houses of interest to you, the state of the market, how safe the neighborhood is, and more. Another factor in your decision is how the house is equipped to grow with you—will it continue to meet your needs in the next five years? It’s critical to establish a sound foundation that works for you today and in the future.
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Effective Technical Writing Is Essential for Your Organization's Success

Mar 18, 2021 By Melissa Connors In SolarWinds
"No one likes documentation", chirped the little blue birds. The bird quotes in the image above are all taken from real tweets and are listed below for accessibility: I can't argue with "liking to write documentation" being a rare skill, since so many people are vocal about disliking it. That tweet might prove to be true, in which case, technical writers should simply be more appreciated for the rare gems that they are. In this blog post, however, I’m going to explain.
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Database Cloud Migration Done Right - SolarWinds Lab Episode #95

Mar 17, 2021 By SolarWinds In SolarWinds
The global pandemic has accelerated corporate planning for cloud computing and digital transformation by 2-4 years on average. But database migration, the process of moving a database from one place to another, is no walk in the park. Obstacles abound. Setbacks are common.
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Manually Add a Metadata Source in SentryOne Document

Mar 17, 2021 By Jon Moore In SolarWinds
SentryOne Document supports multiple metadata sources, and we plan to expand available providers in the future. But what if you want to add a metadata source that isn’t currently supported? This is where SentryOne Document’s Custom Metadata Import, available in both the Software and Cloud edition, can help. Leveraging this provider, you can manually insert any metadata source—DB2, REST API, or others.
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How Does Page Load Time Affect Your Conversion Rate?

Mar 16, 2021 By Pingdom In SolarWinds
As a consumer, you know how you respond to slow sites. You hit the back button or close the browser. As a business owner, you’re well aware of this. You’re a consumer, too, after all. So, you know page load time and conversion rate are related. But how exactly? How does it affect the bottom line? In this article, we’ll analyze how page load time affects conversion rates and by how much.
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Tweaking Your Monitoring Strategy for a Seamless End-User Experience

Mar 15, 2021 By Craig McDonald In SolarWinds
Technology and end users have an almost dichotomous relationship; as technology gets more complex, end users expect a more seamless experience. At the same time, end users are also looking for maximized application availability and performance. How can a federal IT team meet these increasing demands? The answer is monitoring. Most monitoring instances have been implemented as an afterthought or as a way to solve a single, specific problem.
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Application-Centric and Database-Centric Monitoring: Why You Need Both

Mar 15, 2021 By Ukpai Ugochi. In SolarWinds
How would you like it if your application shut down or started running slow without any warning? Let’s say, for instance, users who like your application try to access it, but aren’t able to. How would you know whether low traffic to your site is because users weren’t satisfied or because they simply weren’t able to access it? Users definitely won’t be satisfied when your application starts crawling with long response times.
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5 Things to Know About the Orion Platform Database Today

Mar 12, 2021 By Thomas LaRock In SolarWinds
1. It’s the Back End for 14 Products and Connectors The full list is published here. The key is, a lot of products all leverage this single database, though not every customer runs every product. Over 20 years, the Orion Platform has evolved into, well, a pickup truck. It’s a utility vehicle, doing the best job it can for everyone who needs a ride. As such, this pickup truck works great most of the time.
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Further Tips on our Database Migration to the Azure Cloud Session at MS Ignite 2021

Mar 11, 2021 By Kevin Kline In SolarWinds
I was really stoked to deliver a session at Microsoft Ignite with my long-time friend and fellow Head Geek™, Tom LaRock, on the topic of migrating an on-premises SQL Server database to the Azure cloud. You can watch the session on demand here. In addition, Microsoft MVP and SQL Server expert David Klee provides an excellent recap on each of the major elements Tom and I discussed.
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How AI Will Give IT Professionals Their Time Back

Mar 10, 2021 By Sascha Giese, Head Geek In SolarWinds
The whole world has been dreaming about the possibilities of artificial intelligence for decades. Whether it's cars capable of making critical decisions and driving themselves, or robots capable of lending a hand around the house, the potential is almost limitless. The benefits of AI aren't limited to the everyday life of the consumer, however, and IT is just one sector set to reap the rewards as software becomes ever smarter.
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5 Universal Steps to Cloud Database Migration

Mar 10, 2021 By Kevin Kline In SolarWinds
Chances are if you’re reading this, you are (or are thinking about) moving to cloud. While cloud migration isn’t a new term and many people are migrating, there are a few things you should know before taking the leap. Migrating your database to the cloud is worth the hours of planning, sorting through data and running tests because if it’s not done right, it may come with more bad than good.
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4 Ways to Simplify IT Knowledge Management

Mar 9, 2021 By Liz Beavers In SolarWinds
The saying “knowledge is power” may be a cliché, but the truth of it holds strong, especially as it relates to IT systems and processes. With all the many moving parts in IT and the overall business, employees can often feel either bombarded with information overload or uncertain without enough. For this reason, many organizations have turned to knowledge management to provide structured processes for collecting, storing, and disseminating knowledge throughout the organization.
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Pinpointing a Memory Leak For an Application Running on DigitalOcean

Mar 9, 2021 By Loggly Team In SolarWinds
It can be difficult to track down memory leaks, especially when deploying apps on cloud-based application services. Often teams are left with restarting their apps as the only—and less than ideal—recourse to get them back up and running. So what do you do when your cloud-based app springs a memory leak, and how do you pinpoint the cause? In this article, we’ll create a Java app designed to purposely leak memory and deploy it to DigitalOcean.
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Page Load Time in E-Commerce: How to Track and Improve Key Metrics

Mar 9, 2021 By Pingdom In SolarWinds
When you’re in e-commerce, page load time is crucial. Any change you make to your site can affect it, as you’ve probably found out the hard way on several occasions. So you want to make sure your site doesn’t slow down again. Or at least that when it happens, it doesn’t go unnoticed and unaddressed for any longer than it has to. Relax—you’re in the right place. In this article, we’ll examine which metrics to track and improve to keep your site in tip-top shape.
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SQL Sentry Tips and Tricks: Monitoring Targets Across Multiple Domains

Mar 9, 2021 By Lee Walsh In SolarWinds
A frequently asked question when I’m speaking with SQL Sentry customers is, “Can I monitor targets across multiple domains?” The answer to this question is yes. Although there might be specific scenarios in which you’ll want to have multiple SQL Sentry installs, it’s possible to monitor targets across multiple domains through one install (i.e., one centralized SQL Sentry database). There are a couple of different options available to do so.
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MSP software: 10 tools MSP companies should try in 2021

Mar 8, 2021 By SolarWinds In SolarWinds
2021 is sure to bring a number of challenges for your MSP—here are some of the best tools on the market today that can help your company overcome these challenges. Managed services providers (MSPs) and other businesses that deal with sensitive data on behalf of their customers and their own organization face a range of challenges.
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More Upgrade Tales From the Ticket Queue

Mar 8, 2021 By Chrystal Taylor In SolarWinds
Recently, Leon kicked this sharing process off sharing what he has seen in the support queue. I read it, applaud it, and have more tips to share. As Leon mentioned, and you may have seen the banner on THWACK and other notifications regarding this, the digital signing certificate is being revoked on March 8, 2021. This means if you haven’t upgraded to get the new certificate before then, you’re probably going to run into issues running your Orion module(s) installation.
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Monitoring PHP Application Performance: A Step-by-Step Guide

Mar 8, 2021 By AppOptics Team In SolarWinds
Today we’re here to show you the ropes on PHP monitoring. You’ll learn how to monitor the performance of your PHP applications. But why is doing this valuable in the first place? It used to be common for application performance to be considered a non-functional requirement. Things have changed, though. Nowadays, more and more software professionals have come to think of performance not as a nice-to-have, but as the most important must-have.
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Upgrade Tales From the Ticket Queue

Mar 5, 2021 By Leon Adato In SolarWinds
As you might imagine, it’s a bit of a busy time here at SolarWinds HQ. There is A LOT going on, not the least of which is encouraging our customers to upgrade before March 8. (Why March 8? Keep reading and I’ll explain in a moment.) First, I want to emphasize the important part of that sentence: “encouraging our customers to upgrade before March 8.”
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ITSM For All: Bringing Human Resources into the Service Desk

Mar 4, 2021 By Liz Beavers In SolarWinds
For those who have been keeping up with our series on IT Service Management (ITSM) beyond IT, welcome back! If you’re new to this conversation, it isn’t like a podcast where I’ll send you back to part one, but you may find it helpful to visit the previous recommendations for other internal service providers. Reflecting on 2020, we saw how powerful collaboration in the service desk could be in maintaining users’ productivity and achieving broader business goals.
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Debugging Development Logs with Papertrail and rKubeLog

Mar 4, 2021 By Papertrail Team In SolarWinds
It’s important to ensure the logging and monitoring of a service is as consistent across environments as the code itself. However, it can be expensive and cumbersome to test the logging functionality with the usual required log exporters, database infrastructure, and processing requirements of normal production-grade solutions.
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SQL Sentry Events Log Updates Provide a Centralized View of Events

Mar 4, 2021 By Allan Hitchcock In SolarWinds
The SQL Sentry Environment Health Overview (EHO), which is part of the dashboard shown on the Start page, enables you to see all the conditions that have fired alongside the overall health of your database environment. We understand how useful it is to be able to quickly review the health information without having to dig deep into performance data, and we’re excited to announce a few enhancements to the EHO, Events Log, and Actions Log available in the SQL Sentry 2021.1 release.
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Your Performance Data, Your Way With Custom Charts in SentryOne Portal

Mar 4, 2021 By Tyler Benfield In SolarWinds
Our product and engineering teams have spent a significant amount of time over the past year working on a new dashboard experience in SentryOne® Portal to give you the upper hand in monitoring your servers and diagnosing performance issues. Providing control over the way data is displayed is one of our most requested features, and we’re excited to satisfy this request with custom charts.
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Best Practices for Monitoring Your End-User Experience - SolarWinds Lab Episode #94

Mar 4, 2021 By SolarWinds In SolarWinds
Knowing if a server has high CPU is helpful, but does it really matter if your end users can still access their apps without performance issues? If you're only monitoring the server side, then you don't have a complete picture of your environment. End-user monitoring can be an extremely valuable tool—if you know how to you use it. Join Product Manager Katie Cole and Head Geek Patrick Hubbard as they dive deep into best practices for Pingdom®, the SaaS-based, end-user experience monitoring tool from SolarWinds.
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"SUDO Teach Me a Lesson"

Mar 2, 2021 By Leon Adato In SolarWinds
The command “sudo” is an essential part of Vax, Unix, and Linux operating systems. It’s so intrinsic to how SysAdmins work, many consider “sudo” to be a built-in command and are shocked when they encounter a system where it’s missing. Since its introduction in 1980, it’s been used millions of times a day, on millions of systems, by millions of users around the world.
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Most Essential Tools Help Track Website Performance

Mar 2, 2021 By Pingdom In SolarWinds
Websites and web applications are the modern equivalents to storefronts, business cards, road show booths, newspapers, markets, bulletin boards, software installed on the client’s machine, and much more. Being a business-critical component, and sometimes the business itself in the case of SaaS applications, a website or app experiencing any downtime or disruption can have serious financial implications (aka clients and prospects leaving).
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5 Reasons You Don't Need a Management Title to Be a Leader

Mar 2, 2021 By Jason Hall In SolarWinds
Leaders can be categorized, somewhat, by their motivation. I recall an offsite meeting a few years ago that began with everyone contemplating the question, "Why do you lead?" There were about 15 people in the room, and each attendee could be grouped in one of the following categories: Nothing is wrong with any of these categories necessarily. They’re all concepts that can drive either positive or negative outcomes.
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Expert Guide to Redis Monitoring

Mar 1, 2021 By Mathews Musukuma. In SolarWinds
Redis is an open source. in-memory data structure store with blazing performance that’s used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis is licensed under BSD (Berkeley Source Distribution), which means it can be used for free with some minimum use restrictions. It supports a good number of abstract data structures, such as strings, maps, lists, and so on. Redis, which is used as a database to store data, is fast in performance.
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Project Management as a Critical Skillset

Mar 1, 2021 By Brandon Shopp In SolarWinds
Public sector IT departments have undergone sweeping modernization efforts, from virtualization and mobility to cloud computing and digital transformation. At the same time, this challenging period of remote work increases the burden on federal IT teams to ensure staffers can continue working without technical glitches and keep projects on track. The project manager (PM) is an increasingly critical role.
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Gain Visibility into Performance Across Your Data Estate with SQL Sentry Premium Edition

Mar 1, 2021 By Suril Jasani In SolarWinds
Earlier this year, we announced our plan to release new SQL Sentry editions that would help data professionals not only get started easily with SQL Sentry but also gain visibility across their data estate. We ended up making some tweaks to our SQL Sentry editions following that announcement, and we are excited to introduce both a brand-new edition and an updated edition of our flagship database performance monitoring solution.
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