Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

June 2021

Featured Post

The Technologies Every IT Professional Needs to Consider in 2021

Most organizations make annual predictions for the year ahead, but 2021 is different. The past 12 months obviously proved incredibly unpredictable, but this year we already know the world has changed. IT, in particular, has needed to move quickly to support a widespread shift to supporting remote workers. One month into 2021, and we're already seeing the trend continue, and it looks likely to be the same in the years to come.

How to Connect With Other Community Members on THWACK

At some point, all IT professionals need a little help, and a great way to get that help is to ask other IT pros. A great place to ask for some help is the THWACK community. SolarWinds solutions are rooted in our deep connection to our user base in the THWACK® online community. More than 150,000 members are here to solve problems, share technology and best practices, and directly contribute to our product development process.

You Have to EARN the Gorilla Suit

There’s an old joke that goes something like this: back in the days of vaudeville, comedy acts were all the rage. This young guy wants to get into the business, but he’s not sure his act is good enough. He knows all the great comedians of the time would put on a gorilla suit, and the audience ate it up. So the first time he goes up in front of an audience, he throws on the suit and prepares to walk out on stage.

Full Stack Django Monitoring, Part 2

In the first part of this series, we deployed a Django application on a DigitalOcean Droplet and created a simple Django application. To monitor our Django application, we installed the SolarWinds® APM Integrated Experience featuring AppOptics™, Loggly®, and Pingdom®. In the conclusion of this article, we’ll explore the different types of monitoring provided by the APM Integrated Experience.

A Look Back at the Year That Was

Remember where your business was a year ago? Remember where you were a year ago? How could anyone forget? As the seriousness of the pandemic became apparent, nearly every business experienced chaos and confusion. What was reliable and routine suddenly became ambiguous and unsure—in literally a day. Offices, factories, retail stores, and restaurants were shut down, and employees were sent home.

A Riddle, a Sale, and the Importance of Proactive End-User Monitoring

Finally, the days are getting longer, the sun is heating up, and I’m able to spend all my free time outside soaking it in here in Austin, Texas. As I was laying out this weekend, I came up with a riddle for you: what do sunscreen, a life vest, and SolarWinds® Pingdom® have in common? Whether it’s real or metaphorical crickets I’m hearing, here’s the answer: proactivity.

Secure By Design | The CISO Perspective

CDW Technology Vice President & Chief Information Security Officer Ruben Chacon, SolarWinds® CISO and VP, Security Tim Brown, and SolarWinds Head Geek Thomas LaRock talk about what the CISO needs to know to face today’s escalating cybersecurity threats – and what it’s like to be in the “hot seat” when challenges inevitably arise.

The Visibility Gap: How to Avoid Blind Spots in IT Monitoring

IT monitoring is a requirement of the modern IT organization for ensuring the health and security of all layers in the IT stack. But, as inclusive as organizations try to be when maintaining a vigil over the moving pieces in a network, some systems ultimately escape notice. But instead of accepting this as a cost of doing business, consider the task at hand: prevent the unseen from causing harm to IT infrastructures and to the business processes reliant on them.

IT Operations Management (ITOM) and Automation: What IT Pros Need to Know

IT pros lose precious time every day battling menial IT operations management (ITOM) tasks. ITOM covers the things needed to support the network infrastructure delivering IT services. This includes hardware like switches, servers, and firewalls in the data center or enterprise network and the tools needed to make sure everything runs optimally. According to the SolarWinds 2020 Cloud Confessions survey, 78% of tech pros report spending less than 10% of their time proactively optimizing their environments.

Turning Cross-Stack Correlation Into Better Collaboration | THWACK Livecast Series Session #3

During this THWACK® Livecast series, we'll highlight SolarWinds network management tools designed to help IT professionals navigate increasing complexity with easy-to-use unified solutions. Attendees will learn how to leverage SolarWinds tools to communicate clearly and concisely to management, end users, or even ISPs.

How to Monitor Full-Stack Django Applications

Modern web applications can be complex. A typical application stack usually involves several components spread across different layers. For example, HTML5 and AngularJS can make up a site’s front end. User inputs and queries from the front end can be passed on to containerized microservices running on a middleware, which in turn could pass the queries to a back-end database. Systems like WAFs and LDAP servers can be used for security and authentication.

A DBA's Habit for Success: CMMI (Part Five)

We’ve reached the final piece of our five-part series, and while I’m sad to end it, I hope you or your DBA teams have learned enough to move forward with the Information Management Maturity Model (IMMM). Although there are five steps to this model, several DBAs stop at the fourth. It’s common for large organizations to give this step to management and higher-ups, rather than DBA teams.

SolarWinds SQL Sentry Overview

SolarWinds SQL Sentry is designed to help you quickly identify and address Microsoft SQL Server and Azure SQL database performance problems that could delay, or even halt, data delivery. Find out how SQL Sentry can help you troubleshoot bottlenecks and optimize database performance. SolarWinds® SQL Sentry is a powerful database performance monitoring solution designed to help you find and fix database performance problems—and prevent future challenges—that could delay data delivery or even bring business data systems to a halt.

How to Install SolarWinds SQL Sentry

This video shows you how to successfully install SolarWinds SQL Sentry. SolarWinds® SQL Sentry is a powerful database performance monitoring solution designed to help you find and fix database performance problems—and prevent future challenges—that could delay data delivery or even bring business data systems to a halt.

Building and Monitoring Robust Automatic Deployments

Have you ever heard the mantra “Don’t deploy on Fridays?” There are blog posts, tweets, and t-shirts shouting this slogan to anyone who will listen. Maybe your organization follows this policy. The purpose of not deploying on Fridays is to give the team better work/life balance by preventing them from having to work on the weekends if something goes wrong during or after the deployment.

How to Create an Easy-to-Navigate Employee Portal | SolarWinds Service Desk

The SolarWinds Service Desk Employee Portal is a one-stop shop for employee service needs. Employees can reach out to the IT team by submitting a ticket or via chat, access contact information they need during office hours, and search for existing solutions to any problem at hand 24/7. By customizing your portal’s layout and navigation around your employees’ needs, you better enforce their habit of using the portal when they need to communicate with your team or other service providers in your organization.

How to Monitor Full-Stack Django Applications

Modern web applications can be complex. A typical application stack usually involves several components spread across different layers. For example, HTML5 and AngularJS can make up a site’s front end. User inputs and queries from the front end can be passed on to containerized microservices running on a middleware, which in turn could pass the queries to a back-end database. Systems like WAFs and LDAP servers can be used for security and authentication.

Document Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL Databases With Database Mapper

We’re excited to announce SentryOne Document is now called SolarWinds® Database Mapper! The recently released Database Mapper 2021.8 enables you to document three additional database environments: Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. This makes Database Mapper a great tool to use in conjunction with SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer and SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor database management solutions.

Autoscaling AppOptics With Apache Deployed in K8s Pods

Introduction Since its introduction in 2014, Kubernetes has become the de-facto standard for deploying and scaling containers for cloud deployments and on-premises environments. Initially, it required a DevOps/SRE team to build, deploy, and maintain the Kubernetes deployment in the cloud. Now, all major cloud vendors provide a managed Kubernetes offering, freeing up teams to focus on managing and scaling the application instead of the infrastructure.

There's More Than One Way to Monitor Database Performance - SolarWinds Lab Episode #96

In this episode of SolarWinds Lab™, Head Geeks™ Kevin Kline and Thomas LaRock will show you the basics of database monitoring using free features within Microsoft® SQL Server® like Extended Events and SQL Agent Monitoring. Then they'll show you how to extend and amplify your database performance monitoring effectiveness with SolarWinds products Server & Application Monitor, Database Performance Analyzer, SQL Sentry, Database Performance Monitor, and Database Insights for SQL Server.

Can They Really See That Data? Auditing Access Controls Across Environments

"Who has access to sensitive financial data in our organization?" Assuming you have a definition of what "sensitive financial data" means for your organization, can you easily answer this question? If you needed to perform an audit to verify only the appropriate people have access, what actions would you take?

How to Integrate SolarWinds Service Desk with Dameware Remote Everywhere

SolarWinds Service Desk and Dameware Remote Everywhere are our powerful, affordable, and scalable ITSM solutions designed to integrate to help IT pros streamline support from incident to resolution. By combining the power of Service Desk and Dameware Remote Everywhere, IT teams can streamline support, helping improve Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), minimize employee downtime, and maximize the value IT delivers to the organization.

Classic Event Viewer Retires

The classic event viewer, introduced in June 2011, has been the heart of SolarWinds® Papertrail™. It’s where we spend most of our time, searching, tailing, and sharing event data. Over the last 10 years, Papertrail fans across the globe have shared their ideas with our development team and helped us improve and refine the event viewer.
Featured Post

How IT Investment Will Be Revolutionized in 2021

Have you ever seen or heard a word repeated so often it begins to lose its meaning? This phenomenon is called "semantic satiation," and it's something I'm sure we've all experienced over the past 12 months. While special mention must go to "the new normal" and "social distancing," I'd like to throw a hat in the ring for a word that once most commonly appeared before "capacitator" in one of Doc Brown's rants in Back to the Future: "flux."

Announcing Our Expanded Database Solutions Portfolio - Designed to Improve the Lives of Database Professionals

Today, SolarWinds announced our expanded database performance management portfolio. With the recent acquisition of SentryOne and launch of Database Insights for SQL Server alongside our award-winning Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) and Database Performance Monitor (DPM) solutions, we intend to become the leader in the database performance management market.

How to Troubleshoot Network Issues-Guide and Recommended Tools

You’re going to run into network issues during normal operations—in part because so many kinds of errors can cause noticeable problems in your network. Identifying the root cause of each issue is critical and to do so successfully, you want to make sure you have the right network troubleshooting solutions in your arsenal before wading in. This helps ensure you have a clear understanding of the scope of the problem before you attempt any network troubleshooting steps.

Do You Need an Alert for Your Alerts? Building Smarter Monitoring Systems

Traditional systems monitoring solutions poll various counters (typically simple network management protocol [SNMP]), pull in data and react to it. If an issue requiring attention is found, an event is triggered—perhaps an email to an administrator or the firing of an alert. The admin subsequently responds as needed. This centralized pull approach is resource-intensive. Due to the pull nature of the requests, it results in data gaps and data that may not be granular enough.

A DBA's Habit for Success: CMMI (Part Three)

Welcome back! As we enter the halfway point of this five-part series, we’ll discuss Level 3 of the capability maturity model (CMM) and the role it plays in helping DBAs grow their organization and increase the functionality of their business. By now you should be familiar with the definition of CMM and the Information Maturity Model (IMMM). If you need a refresher, part one and two of this series cover the basics of the models and the overall benefits of following a maturity model.