Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

August 2021

How to Do Simple UX Monitoring With ipMonitor

Learn how you can leverage ipMonitor user experience monitors to be sure you know about any user experience issues before end users do. Do you know what’s going on right now with all the network devices, servers, and applications that are the magic behind your business? To keep on top of what’s happening with all of those moving parts, you need an easy-to-use, reliable monitoring solution that tells you what’s up, what’s down, and what’s not performing as expected.

Indexing Strategies for SQL Server Performance

One of the easiest ways to increase query performance in SQL Server is to make sure it can quickly access the requested data as efficiently as possible. In SQL Server, using one or more indexes can be exactly the fix you need. In fact, indexes are so important, SQL Server can warn you when it figures out there’s an index missing that would benefit a query.

How the Pandemic Impacted the Government's Cloud Migration Plans

“Cloud-first” has been a government imperative for many years, but the pandemic usurped this strategy, making “cloud-now” a priority. The results have been transformational. The cloud made wide-scale government telework possible, but it’s also given agencies the opportunity to test drive new cloud applications and experience the scalability and security benefits first-hand.

Indexes Matter-How Poor Index Management Can Ruin Query Performance

Ideally, database queries use the fewest possible resources: time, memory, bandwidth, etc. Lower resource consumption maps to better query performance. To find relevant data in a table, a database query relies on lookup operations, and a table index can help a query efficiently find the table values it needs. With an efficient, well-designed table index, a database query can find the table data it needs, avoiding the need to "scan"—or search through—all the table data.

What Is End-User Monitoring and Why It's Critical for Your Business

End-user experience monitoring is a practice designed to track user behavior or actions while interacting with a website or web application. The data gathered by end-user experience monitoring helps measure the impact of website and device performance on the end user’s journey. A meaningful end-user experience can help improve the enterprise’s operational efficiency, troubleshooting processes, employee productivity, and overall business value.

Welcoming Scope Creep | An IT Journey to Monitoring Glory: Session 2

Now that your Network Management System is up and running, where do you go from here? “Scope creep” doesn’t (necessarily) have to be a bad phrase. Extending your monitoring out beyond the initial intention isn’t just encouraged, it’s commendable. Having all your business-critical information in one place speeds up troubleshooting and allows you to get in front of issues before they turn into problems.

Making Your Service Desk the GOAT

Imagine every time you visited the service desk to submit a ticket, you were greeted by the boisterous drums from the medley of the Olympics—you’d feel like a gold medalist! Though a theme song may seem far-fetched, rolling out white glove treatment can elevate the service desk in the eyes of your users. Let’s explore how you can land a 10 out of 10 in service delivery by embracing more user-centric service management strategies.

The Syslog Staying Power

Some classics never go out of style, like a good pair of boat shoes or cowboy boots, depending on where you live. In the logging world, syslog is this classic. For more than 30 years, the syslog protocol has been a standard for logging. When we talk to users about what type of logs they collect and how they send them to SolarWinds ® Papertrail ™ , syslog always comes up. “Our application logs and server system logs are sent to Papertrail.

How to Discover Devices and Connections With Engineer's Toolset

Learn how you can easily discover MAC addresses within your local network and match them to IP addresses with the MAC Address Discovery tool from SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset. SolarWinds® Engineer’s Toolset (ETS) helps you monitor and troubleshoot your network with the most trusted tools in network management. Version 11.0 now comes with an intuitive web console for 5 of the most popular tools - Response Time Monitor, Interface Monitor, CPU Monitor, Memory Monitor, and TraceRoute.

Basic SQL Server Query Tuning Secrets Every SQL Admin Should Know

The performance of your applications is a complex, multi-layered puzzle. Performance can be negatively impacted at the application layer or even by remote calls to networked services. However, the most common bottleneck for applications is the data storage layer. The most common data storage tier for applications is a relational database, whose performance can vary widely depending on query optimization.

How to Use Intelligent Query Processing to Boost Query Outcomes

Experienced SQL Server database administrators and developers spend years learning best practices within SQL Server and how to identify performance pitfalls in the query optimizer. Starting with SQL Server 2017, Microsoft introduced a family of features called “Intelligent Query Processing” to provide more consistent performance for your queries.

Resilient Infrastructure for a Secure Future

Each year, SolarWinds® surveys IT professionals around the world to gauge what’s most pressing on their minds, but also to understand their organization’s challenges and how they intend to overcome them. In 2021, we wanted to know what organizations think of the increasing risks they face from both the reality of supporting the hybrid workplace and the expanding cyberthreat landscape—and how they’ve prepared to address them.

An Overview of Intelligent Query Processing in SQL Server

When you issue a query to SQL Server or Azure SQL, it internally tries to optimize a query plan through calculations such as whether to use an index. Much of SQL Server’s query plans are based on its best guess of what will happen at run time when your query executes. Even when SQL Server guesses right, as your data changes (especially as the volume of data increases), optimal plans can end up performing so poorly, they can drag your whole system’s performance down.

Systems Management Named Biggest Area for IT Professional Development

The 2020 SolarWinds® IT Pro Day survey looked at the changing roles and responsibilities of IT pros throughout the pandemic. Overall, nearly two-thirds of surveyed IT pros discovered a new sense of confidence, despite contending with challenges such as reduced budgets, greater decision-making responsibilities, and longer hours caused by their organizations’ response to the pandemic.

Peer Recognition and Why It Matters

There should always be opportunities to laud our peers’ achievements and good work. One of the things I’ve noticed (at least here in America) is we tend to speak up about negative things and more quietly acknowledge the good. I want us to get better at publicly celebrating the success of our peers. IT Pro Day is nearly upon us, and this means there’s an opportunity to recognize our peers through the second annual awards.

You Can Only Fix What You Measure (So Measure What You Want to Fix)

Recently, my colleagues Pete Di Stefano, Ashley Adams, and I hosted a webcast on the topic of capacity planning and optimization. You can listen/watch it here, it was a really fun conversation. As part of the discussion, we talked about the need to measure the right things to get the correct outcome. Keep in mind my oft-repeated mantra: monitoring is simply the collection of data. You need a robust, mature tool to add context, which transforms those metrics into information.

Visibility Into Distributed Availability Groups With SQL Sentry

I began my career as an associate software development engineer in June of 2020, and during my short time in the industry, I’ve had the opportunity to build and troubleshoot continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) pipelines, work on many different technologies within several SolarWinds®, formerly SentryOne, products, and learn proper engineering practices.

The Service Desk and Parenthood's Shared Classroom

This past April, my husband and I took on our most exciting and daunting chapter yet: parenthood. Despite the chaos around us, we made the most of our pregnancy and thoroughly enjoyed sifting through baby clothes, putting together his nursery, choosing a name...the works. When it came time to bring our little guy home, I thought we had relatively grounded expectations for what our lives would look like as a family of three.

Exploring Your Data Universe

You can learn a lot about an organization by looking at their data. For example, if I see “LoanToValue” (LTV) or “CollateralValue,” I could surmise they deal with financial data—specifically loans—in some fashion. Developers and database administrators with domain knowledge about the intrinsic meaning of the data are precious friends. These individuals understand the meaning behind the data and how it works within the applications of the organization.

IT Asset Management With Discovery Agents

Managing IT assets can be a challenge if you don’t have a powerful tool to accurately track your IP-connected devices. Whether it’s ensuring all your employees are using the latest operating system software version or quickly attaching a related item to a ticket, with SolarWinds Service Desk, you can keep track of your inventory and budget and ultimately mitigate risk when staying on top of your assets. This short video shows you how to install and use the Solarwinds Discovery Agent and Discovery Scanner.

What's Your IT Pro Journey?

Last week, my friend and colleague Leon Adato ( t| b) introduced 2021’s IT Pro Day theme “Bring IT On” and observed an IT pros’ life experiences helped to form the foundation of their skillsets and careers, ultimately preparing them for any challenge thrown their way. Whether it’s a pandemic, natural disaster, or a configuration error that takes down a mission critical server—we know IT pros have it in hand.

Generating DDL Statements to Recreate Single Objects

Every database administrator (DBA) is—first and foremost—human. And everyone makes mistakes. It’s not the absence of mistakes but rather how you prepare for those mistakes that makes you a great DBA. Luckily, there are many ways to prepare for those mishaps, whether the errors are made by you or someone else on your team. One commonly made mistake is to drop an object in a database or accidentally delete data.

Extend Your APM Capabilities With End-User Data

In the internet-driven economy, businesses rely on applications for different functions in the customer, partner, and employee spheres. Over the years, such applications have become more functional, faster, and user-friendly. However, end users still encounter slow loading pages, transaction failures, and esoteric error messages. These errors cause inconvenience to the users and lead to significant financial and reputational losses.

A DBA's Perspective: What Is DevOps?

If you’ve worked in IT in recent years, you’re no doubt familiar with the term “DevOps.” Accelerating the pace of development and faster delivery of new features is the goal. DevOps involves integrating the development life cycle with Agile methodology. DevOps practices applied to database operations is now commonly referred to as DataOps.

IT Pro Day '21: Bring IT On

IT Pro Day has always been about singing the praises of practitioners across the vast spectrum of tech specialties, from network engineers and systems administrators; to infosec analysts and developers; to storage and virtualization admins; and even to monitoring specialists (whether that’s your whole job or just part of a much longer list of responsibilities). But an important question we should consider is what, exactly, prepared you for this career?

Building a Network Architecture to Support the Next Phase of Remote Work

The global pandemic continues to fluctuate, but the reliance on IT services and teams to support service continuity in the public sector remains steady. To ensure network operations continue running at peak performance, there are several actions government IT teams can take to consistently maintain a network architecture capable of supporting a remote workforce. IT tools like support tickets and the IT service desk directly support end users and organizational goals.