More personal and proprietary data is available online than ever before—and many malicious actors want to get ahold of this valuable information. Using an intrusion detection system (IDS) is essential to the protection of your network and on-premises devices. Intrusion detection systems are designed to identify suspicious and malicious activity through network traffic, and an intrusion detection system (IDS) enables you to discover whether your network is being attacked.

A year ago, in July of 2020, I started my SysAdmin Day post  with the words, Here we are, 12 months later, and a lot has changed, but life (and tech) continue to be extraordinarily not-normal. The challenges we face as IT pros in general and SysAdmins in particular push us to our limits daily, and there’s no hiding or sugar-coating it. In the face of all this, I’d like to offer some new thoughts for my SysAdmin family to help process the year that was and navigate the challenges to come.

Engineering teams can only be as efficient as the processes they employ during development. The need for increased efficiency is why software development has shifted from the “waterfall” approach to a more responsive, agile methodology. In an agile development environment, quality software can be delivered consistently to suit the ever-changing needs of stakeholders and end users.

Unattended incidents won’t clean up after themselves and will come back to haunt you—whether as rising MTTR metrics, a cluttered Incident Index, fruitless back-and-forth communication, or a declining CSAT score. Powerful automation conditions can drive productivity, save you manual work, and speed up your incident lifecycle management —and keep your employees happy.

In our previous blog, we looked back at the year of transformation that was 2020. To say the last year was a bit hectic—even chaotic at times—would be an understatement. But for many organizations, IT saved the day. IT delivered and enabled technology solutions to keep the business in business.

A data center typically employs between 30-200 people depending on the size and the intended project use. But only a fraction of those folks run the IT side. Besides swapping gear—the infamous “remote hands”—there isn’t much to do as long as there aren’t any outages, and rumor has it a data center is a nice place to sleep—it’s dark, cool, and the deep humming noise can have a pacifying impact on some.

A well-functioning IT infrastructure and application fleet is one of the core elements to powering a successful modern business. But how can we ensure it’s indeed well-functioning? Continuous monitoring is one of the methods to ensure an infrastructure setup is managed successfully.

Planning a hybrid application migration? There’s plenty to deal with already, and now your manager wants to know—how are you going to make sure that the migration is a success? The secret is to take a subjective judgment and turn it into an objective one. As you probably know, there is no way that you can guarantee a problem-free migration. Don’t leave it up solely to how your boss or anyone else feels about the migration.

Storage performance is key to the health and performance of a SQL Server database. When storage performance begins to slow down, queries suffer from more waits on disk. These waits can show up as a variety of SQL Server wait types, including WRITELOG and wait types starting with PAGEIOLATCH.

No longer a foreign concept, remote access has gained traction with businesses to facilitate convenient off-site support and virtual meetings, especially during these recent pandemic times. TeamViewer has been a popular professional choice for remote administration with its all-in-one solution that can be installed and updated with ease.

Planning a hybrid application migration? There’s plenty to deal with already, and now your manager wants to know—how are you going to make sure that the migration is a success? The secret is to take a subjective judgment and turn it into an objective one. As you probably know, there is no way that you can guarantee a problem-free migration. Don’t leave it up solely to how your boss or anyone else feels about the migration.

One of the business consequences from the pandemic—increased remote working—is causing technology challenges across most industries, including the public sector. The pandemic interrupted “business as usual” and caused a spike in the need to work remotely. As a result, applications organizations once took for granted consequently became mission critical.

A website is an essential part of your organization’s online presence, and it’s crucial to attract, engage, and convert visitors into customers. Accordingly, the imperative is to maintain a reliable website capable of loading quickly and offering a seamless experience to its visitors. Otherwise, a suboptimally maintained website can badly affect user engagement, deteriorate reputation, and lead to revenue loss.

A website is an essential part of your organization’s online presence, and it’s crucial to attract, engage, and convert visitors into customers. Accordingly, the imperative is to maintain a reliable website capable of loading quickly and offering a seamless experience to its visitors. Otherwise, a suboptimally maintained website can badly affect user engagement, deteriorate reputation, and lead to revenue loss.

On one hand, organizations are increasingly relying on web applications to engage customers and deliver value across multiple touchpoints. On the other hand, the complexity of web application environments has intensified significantly due to the prevalence of microservices architecture, content delivery networks (CDNs), and load balancing, among others. At the same time, end users expect a web application to be highly responsive, available around the clock, and accessible from anywhere on any device.

One of the most common performance problems with SQL Server databases in production is the blocking of queries, which happens because database resources are locked. Understanding why locking happens is just half the battle. Being able to resolve locking, which will resolve blocking issues as well, is the second half.

Log monitoring is a practice used by IT administrators to organize, analyze, and understand a network’s performance. All network devices, including applications and hardware, create logs as they perform operations. Logs are like a device’s diary—they record every event and its critical information like user IP address, date and time, request time, and more.

We’ve reviewed the year that was, how business big and small had to fast forward their digital transformation to accommodate remote work and keep their businesses in business. Some IT leaders have said because of the pandemic, they were able to expedite digitalization and digital transformation within their organizations. Efforts previously envisioned to take months or years were moved forward and achieved in a matter of weeks.

As the past year has shown, cloud computing has proved a vital service for K–12 public schools. It’s enabled online learning during a time of critical need, and the schools who have embraced cloud adoption have thrived and will continue to do so. Let’s look at the ways the cloud is changing public school education today—and some of the common bumps administrators and IT teams should avoid along the way.

SolarWinds® AppOptics™ has officially been announced as a 2021 Top Rated award winner from the customer review site TrustRadius. As one of only three products to win this award in the application performance management (APM) space, our team behind AppOptics would like to thank the customers who helped make this happen. Because unlike other awards, Top Rated is determined by the verified reviews of our users and their experiences with AppOptics.

With over 40% of websites powered by WordPress, there’s a good chance you or someone in your company is using it to update content or manage websites. This is why we’re excited to announce an integration with WP Activity Log—a comprehensive WordPress activity log plug-in—and SolarWinds® Papertrail™.

Every company needs data for various reasons, but hoarding too much data can be a dangerous habit. An overload of data can turn the average IT pro into a hoarder and lead them to obtain too much redundant, outdated, and trivial information, also known as ROT. The lust for big data can be tempting, but it’s also more damaging than companies may think. Five sins may be great threats to security: lust, gluttony, greed, slothfulness, and pride.