Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

October 2021

How Pingdom's Real User Monitoring Can Help Optimize Your WordPress Website

Enterprise web applications or medium-to-large, consumer-facing websites are typically built by teams of engineers, administrators, web developers, and other professionals. However, once a site goes live, the operations team is responsible for keeping the site up and running at optimal performance. Online users aren’t forgiving, often abandoning a site as soon as they encounter an issue with functionality, complexity, or performance.

Working With the WordPress REST API

Logging is an important part of every software application. In addition to capturing user activity, well-structured logs can make it easier to debug problems should they occur. But if your application is split up across several different subsystems, collecting and analyzing disparate logs can be a real challenge. Picture this scenario: You work at a startup that uses a CMS managed by a few admins. You also have a standalone front-end application for users to communicate with your platform via an API.

How to Manage an ETL Data Migration Into the Cloud

As organizations move their workloads into the public cloud, their environments gradually evolve. Initially, an organization tends to aim for a 1:1 migration of resources, typically in the form of virtual machines (VMs). Although this approach allows for an easier data migration path, it’s more costly and offers less flexibility than taking advantage of some of the serverless and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings in the public cloud.

5 Best Network Traffic Monitoring Tools

Monitoring network traffic (which is defined as the data moving across your network at a given time) is important for any business looking to maintain a fast and efficient network. Automating network traffic monitoring and analysis with the support of a tool can help IT teams reduce downtime, identify the causes of bottlenecks, boost the efficiency of troubleshooting efforts, and more.

DevOps: A Philosophy? A Job? An Entire Industry?

When I came to SolarWinds in 2020, I was quickly immersed in the world of developers, application engineers, and IT operations. As I started talking to more customers about their roles, I came to understand each of the job functions uniquely—each with distinct responsibilities completely independent of one another. But as I was researching the age-old conflict between developers and IT ops professionals, I was introduced to a word that has now oversaturated work life: DevOps.

3 Ways IT Teams Can Manage Tool Sprawl

Since schools transitioned to remote learning, districts have added or upgraded their IT education technology and monitoring tools to provide better outcomes for all. But it’s not necessarily a good thing. The saturation of edtech tools may be leading to wasted money, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities. In 2020, the deployment of edtech tools in schools increased by nearly 90% year-over-year.

Effective DataOps Tools for Improving Performance

Some of the best-selling books of all time are self-help books. Reading about the potential for change always intrigues people enough to buy the book. To succeed in enacting positive change, you must do just that—change. People’s habits are familiar and safe, and change requires effort down an unknown path. People aren’t sure of the outcome, and as a result, usually stick with the proven method—even if it’s what they’re trying to change.

How to Make SQL Server Faster on Azure VMs

Many organizations have migrated their environments from on-premises to the cloud, and one of the clouds of choice is Microsoft Azure. For SQL Server workloads, organizations can use platform as a service solutions with features like Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance or infrastructure as a service solutions with Azure SQL virtual machines. Azure SQL virtual machines are an easy target for organizations migrating to Azure due to the simplicity of the migration.

SolarWinds Gives Data Pros the Tools for DataOps Success With Database Mapper and Task Factory

Company enables data pros to accelerate data delivery and cloud migrations more efficiently; showcases database management solutions and educates on database strategies at upcoming industry events.

Master Data Management and Data Governance-How to Build an Effective Strategy

As organizations marshal their data to drive business value throughout the enterprise, it’s becoming more important than ever to ensure the quality of this data. Building data quality, data validation testing, and aligning the data with your organization’s master data (such as products, customers, assets, and locations) is critically important to ensure your reporting is consistent and accurate.

Web Performance of the World's Top 50 Blogs

Am I the only one who thinks blogs were in their prime in the mid-2010s, before the internet began consuming content at wicked fast rates (thanks, Instagram and TikTok)? When someone says the word blog, I think of the chokehold 2015 southern American female fashion bloggers had on the internet. Pure pumpkin spice latte fashion. And though those blogs have, probably for the best, slipped away from the limelight, blogs are still alive and well.

What Is MongoDB's _id Field and How to Use It

The MongoDB _id field is fundamental to every collection in MongoDB, and, by default, it has some useful properties users can take advantage of when familiar with how _id is generated. Understanding the field's default behavior and the advantages and pitfalls associated with it can be useful for managing your collections as well as understanding when to override it.

WordPress Error Logs and Activity Logs

Logging is a fundamental part of software development. While an app is being developed, we rely on logging to confirm our inputs and outputs match our expectations. In production, logging can be an invaluable resource for tracking down bugs or measuring how users interact with the app. We can also consider logs as a sort of time-series value, where a timestamp is associated with a user’s specific action. These logs can be structured, gathered, and analyzed to provide teams with more information.

What Is CI/CD and How to Build ETL Processes

In today’s world of heterogeneous data ecosystems, managing and consuming data can be cumbersome. Organizations often have multiple systems of truth in corresponding to the applications managing the data. While data engineers dream of software that would make it easy to consume and digest different data streams from disparate systems, that scenario rarely comes to fruition.

How to Prepare for a SQL Server DBA Interview and Questions

So, you have an interview lined up for a sweet new gig as a SQL Server database administrator (DBA). What interview questions will you be asked? How can you make sure you ace the interview? What will make you stand out from the other candidates? There are no concrete answers, because… “it depends.” However, you can count on at least two major components of your interview – a technical component and a non-technical component, often focusing on soft skills.

Event and Log Management for Optimized Security and Performance

The full stack isn't just cloud-based, microservices apps, but includes on-premises and hybrid private cloud infrastructure and packaged applications. The challenges associated with aggregating, analyzing, reporting, and alerting intelligently on logs have become more complex than ever due to the acceleration of packaged and customized application deployment in support of business transformation, alongside the growing requirements needed to ensure security and compliance. This webinar will explore multiple methods to ensure compliance, identify threats, and optimize MTTR by monitoring, analyzing, and managing logs across all types of application and infrastructure architectures.

5 Business Insights to Gain From APM

With soaring demand on digital infrastructures, increasing deployment of B2B and B2C custom applications, and ever-tightening budget constraints, it’s more important than ever to ensure service delivery in a cost-effective manner. Delays experienced by your business partners and customers mean higher costs, lost revenue, and lost market share at a time when you can least afford it. In effect, slow is the new down.

How to Quickly Identify Performance Issues in Azure SQL Database

Moving your database to the cloud using a PaaS option such as Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL Managed Instance reduces the maintenance overhead required from the database administrator (DBA). The DBA no longer must worry about managing backups or configuring high availability, for example. That said, the DBA still needs to tune the database’s performance and monitor SQL workloads. The Azure Portal offers several services to quickly identify performance issues for Azure SQL Databases.

3 Steps Government Employees Can Take to Become Good Cybercitizens

As cyberattacks become more sophisticated across ever-expanding attack surfaces, it’s easy to assume the security team will take care of risk management and mitigation. Indeed, employees—both within the agency and across the contractor community—are one of the greatest risks to the government’s security postures.

Monitoring and Securing Office 365 | Government and Education Webinar

Learn how SolarWinds solutions can help you monitor Microsoft Office 365® (O365) performance and security. As organizations adopt O365, their IT team maintains responsibility for ensuring effective operations, so users can continue to collaborate. Moving to the cloud still requires management, and IT pros need to maintain visibility to understand and resolve problems. Access rights and permissions are also important in securing your O365 implementation.

Daily SQL Server Performance Checklist for DBAs

A main focus for database administrators (DBAs) is to ensure server environments are optimized and performance is at its peak. Whether you’re a DBA starting in a new role and are evaluating an existing environment for the first time, or you’re a senior database professional with the ongoing task of maintaining optimal performance, following key SQL Server best practices for installing, configuring, and ensuring new instances of SQL Server are consistently deployed is all in a day’s work.

Modernizing Network Operations: How to Check All the Boxes

Stakeholders expect their network to be fast, prioritized for business, secure, compliant, and cost-efficient. With increased traffic, applications, and services and the complexity of networking technologies to support business needs, companies need a strategy to efficiently monitor and manage the network to quickly respond to business requirements.

Understand the End-User Experience With Holistic Monitoring

You’re expected to monitor the entire end-user experience, so you need to be able to do it all. SolarWinds can help. Together, SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM) and SolarWinds Pingdom can give you the holistic monitoring you need, especially with the recent integration we’ve announced. While WPM monitors the experience of the end users behind your firewall, Pingdom monitors the customers and prospects on the outside of it. With WPM and Pingdom, you can have a holistic view of the performance and availability of your various applications. We’ll show you the benefits of adding SolarWinds Pingdom, including the following.

What's New With Pingdom?

SolarWinds Pingdom is focused on making web application monitoring simple and easy to use, yet still powerful and affordable. In the past six months, we’ve made several updates we’re excited to share with you. These new features come at no additional cost and all customers regardless of tier level have access to them. The updates were launched with two main benefits in mind: ease of use and quick set up. We’ll walk through our latest updates from 2020 including.

10 SQL Server Performance Tuning Best Practices

There are a large number of best practices around SQL Server performance tuning – I could easily write a whole book on the topic, especially when you consider the number of different database settings, SQL Server settings, coding practices, SQL wait types, and so on that can affect performance.

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp Down for Over Five Hours

Did you unconsciously open Instagram, Facebook, or WhatsApp several times throughout the day on Monday, only to get a “Couldn’t refresh feed” message? Did you try again every 20 or so minutes? Did you maybe even restart your phone, not once thinking websites as large as Facebook could possibly go down and believing it must be your own technology? Rejoice: it’s not you, it’s them.

7 Best Log and Syslog Viewers

Many devices—such as switches, routers, firewalls, servers, and printers—support syslog protocol. This standard for sending log messages within a network offers critical information about your system. Consequently, monitoring your network and its syslog messages should be a top priority. Many IT professionals use log and syslog monitors or viewers to gather logs and syslog messages from across their network in a centralized location.

Put the Machines to Work for You: A Modern Approach to Increase IT Agility

Putting machines to work to enhance our everyday lives has been well-ingrained in our society for at least a couple of centuries now. IT workers use machine learning (ML) in their daily work routines, even if they don’t consciously realize it. Automated email alerts, issue escalations, and security patching are just a few examples of how ML has put the systems we rely on to work for us.

The Importance of Sharing "Pretty" Things | An IT Journey to Monitoring Glory: Session 3

During this THWACK® Livecast series, we're focused on you, the IT professional. Whether you're an accidental admin and just getting started, welcoming scope creep and getting noticed at your company, or the monitoring engineer who's ready to shine, these sessions are for you. Attendees will learn how to leverage SolarWinds tools to communicate clearly and concisely to management and become heroes in the Monday morning postmortem meetings. Join the sessions as they happen to ask questions directly to the presenters and get your answers live. Monitoring is a journey, not a destination—we may start at SNMP and WMI, but we'll help you end up victorious.

Native SQL Server Backup Types and How To Guide

When a disaster occurs, the ability to successfully restore SQL Server databases is fundamental for avoiding data loss. It’s not enough to rely on hardware and software technologies to replicate data because these technologies can go wrong or there can be multiple failures during a disaster, meaning you have to rely on backups to recover. SQL Server allows multiple types of backups, and a multitude of options to use with those backups.