Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

September 2021

SQL Server Storage Best Practices: Choosing Storage Options

Storage is one of the most critical components for any relational database management system, and getting the right storage configuration affects reliability, availability, and performance. When it comes to SQL Server storage best practices, choosing between storage hardware options has changed significantly over the last decade, but that doesn’t necessarily make choosing the correct storage options for SQL Server any easier.

Troubleshooting the Internet: If You Can't Have Authority, Visibility Will Do

The vast majority of businesses aren’t all on-premises or all-cloud, but rather in some form of hybrid IT middle ground. That means “who owns the system” (and a closely related issue: “who owns the problem”) continues to be a thorn in the side of many IT pros. In this conversation, SolarWinds Technical Content Manager for Community Kevin M. Sparenberg and Head Geek Leon Adato break down some ways technical teams can get around the lack of authority needed to solve problems and keep critical services up and running.

Boss-Level Log Management for WordPress Site Administrators

WordPress is the most dominant content management system (CMS) in the enterprise website market today. Its open-source nature, thousands of plugins, and wide adoption by commercial hosting providers have bolstered its success. In addition, it’s highly compatible with other website technologies like web servers, database servers, or middleware.

The Questions You Should Ask Your Software Providers

Software providers everywhere are under attack by cyber threat actors. Whether it’s a ransomware, the latest zero-day exploit, or a highly sophisticated, well-resourced, and persistent supply chain like SUNBURST, our entire industry faces an increasingly treacherous threat landscape, and nearly every news day brings with it another wave of announcements and urgent system updates to be made.

Is Application Sprawl in Government Really a Big Problem?

When considering whether to add more applications or monitoring components to your IT system, the answer should always be quality over quantity. Agencies often fall into the trap of application sprawl by adding more and more to their systems—more applications, more tools—without realizing this actually has the potential to reduce system effectiveness. Instead of simply adding more apps, consider instead interoperable ones, or ones you can plug into a common platform.

All About Network Topology-Types and Diagrams

Every network has a specific collection of nodes and links that connect them. The arrangement of those nodes and links, or the network topology, informs performance, maintenance costs, and more. You should know the network topology models in use today when designing or managing a network, including the ring, mesh, bus, star, and tree topologies.

Controlling Cloud Cost Requires a Change in IT Financial Perspective

For IT practitioners, cloud can initially seem like a candy store where everything is enticing and delicious and cheap enough to seem free. What they don’t realize is how quickly costs can add up or be amplified when cloud options are opened to teams across the organization. In this video, SolarWinds Technical Content Manager for Community Kevin M. Sparenberg and Head Geek Leon Adato discuss the need for IT professionals to become more proficient in speaking the language of business and seeing cloud solutions from more than just a technology perspective.

5 Best Tools for Log Collection and Archiving With Guide

Collecting and archiving logs is an essential practice for any organization looking to maintain the performance and security of their network. Logs are like a diary for your devices. They record every message sent from any of your network systems. This information can prove essential for everything from understanding the daily activities of your infrastructure, to improving functionality across your platforms, to identifying and troubleshooting issues.

Bring IT On in the Year of the Ox

IT Pro Day is here, and it feels like the new year in IT! It’s a time to reflect on lessons from the past year and celebrate your achievements while setting goals for the season ahead. The theme for this year, Bring IT On, feels especially appropriate as we’ve been in the Year of the Ox. According to the Chinese zodiac, the ox is known as the “good helper” symbolizing strength, diligence, and persistence. I can’t think of a better sign that embodies IT pros.

IT Service Management: Streamline Your Workflows to Make Everyone Happier

Shadow IT is, at best, an organizational distraction; and at worst, a team of people working at cross-purposes to the business and causing harm. But if shadow IT is such a bad thing, why does it still happen in so many organizations? In under 10 minutes, SolarWinds Head Geek Leon Adato and Technical Content Manager for Community Kevin M. Sparenberg break down what shadow IT is, why it’s bad for the organization even if it seems to be “getting things done,” and how the cycle can be broken with a robust, mature, responsive service management solution and process.

Overprovisioned and Overspent: Optimize Before You Lift and Shift

Do you know what’s wrong with “lift and shift?” Everything. But why? In this video, SolarWinds Head Geek Leon Adato and Technical Content Manager for Community Kevin M. Sparenberg dig into what goes wrong during on-prem to cloud migration of applications and systems in many organizations and how monitoring can help not only avoid those problems but improve the overall outcome as well.

Open-Source Monitoring With SolarWinds AppOptics

In software terms, “open source” means applications and their source code are available for the public to download and modify free of cost. Anyone can access, edit, and supplement the code to create an enhanced version of the application. Vendors often do this by forking the source code to create their own version of the application, marketing their version commercially.

Why SQL Server Monitoring Is the First Step in Improving Performance

SQL Server monitoring is continuous collection and analysis of usage, performance, and event metrics for Microsoft SQL Server. It’s the first step in optimizing performance for applications that depend on your data platform. Highly effective monitoring gives a bird’s-eye view of your entire data estate. It also provides the deep analytics necessary to perform root cause analysis on the most challenging performance problems.

Spotting and Avoiding Database Drift

Managing any database ecosystem is difficult enough: taking backups, maintaining statistics, and doing performance tuning all tax the time of the DBA or database developer. The job is complex even without considering the work you do to manage the various schema and data drifts that can occur. Unless you operate in a vacuum or within a single person organization (and even then, schema drift can occur), drift is going to manifest naturally and as the size of the environment expands.

Cloud or On-Prem? With Monitoring, It's Both-And, Not Either-Or

Despite the migration of services and systems to cloud (either all or in part), many of the fundamental aspects of the day-to-day work IT practitioners do hasn’t changed. It’s just moved. In this session, SolarWinds Head Geek Leon Adato and Technical Content Manager for Community Kevin M. Sparenberg discuss that state of affairs, as well as what monitoring can do to help view those resources as a contiguous whole, despite possibly being split across the on-prem/cloud divide.

Finding the Gaps in Your Data Causing Data Drift

When drift happens within a database, it can occur at a couple of different levels. Drift refers to entities—tables, views, or even data—out of synchronization with each other. This could be a difference in schema structure, data, or even operational metadata like permissions. Often, drifts happen between two different environments like development and staging databases.

Why Change Control for Your Servers Is Important, and How to Do It

The shared responsibility model doesn’t mean cloud customers don't have to worry about changes on their systems. In a brief 10-minute conversation, SolarWinds Head Geek Leon Adato and Technical Content Manager for Community Kevin M. Sparenberg share some statistics highlighting the risks of not managing change in your environment and show a few ways to get control and turn the chore of change control into actionable insights.

Investigating the Database Family Tree

Investigating your family tree can be an interesting experience. For example, what if you discovered you were related to a famous person who won a Nobel Prize or performed a heroic act? Conversely, what if you realized you had an ancestor who was an infamous criminal? Much like examining your genealogy can be an exciting adventure, looking at the family tree of your database can prove to be just as rewarding. Databases occasionally undergo a phenomenon known as drift.

IT Pros to the World: Bring IT On

That’s what they say. Bring it on. I’m ready for this. I’m prepared. But no one could prep for what happened and how things evolved, right? So is preparation not necessary after all? I’ve had numerous discussions with my colleague and fellow Head Geek Leon Adato about this topic, and we even created a video with the background theme of preparation vs. instant action. Leon is kind of a doctoral student in chaos theory—or so it seems—while I try to plan things out.

Shortcut to Value With Loggly

In this video, we will show you how Loggly is laid out and demonstrate the major functions that will have you leveraging the out-of-the-box functions immediately. The SolarWinds® Loggly® log management service integrates into the engineering processes of teams employing continuous deployment and DevOps practices to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), improve service quality, accelerate innovation, and better use valuable development resources.