Federal IT pros have historically had limited time and resources; this makes it crucial to find the source of application slowdowns or outages as quickly as possible. Database virtualization can help by allowing IT pros to separate the storage and application layers within the application stack more quickly, providing easier access to root-cause issues. An estimated 70% of databases are virtualized. Yet, the benefits of virtualized databases come with additional challenges.

As enterprise applications changed over time to serve different business needs and computer systems evolved from the monolithic architecture of mainframes into client-server and distributed systems, mechanisms for communications between different tiers of computer systems also had to develop.

Over the past several years, I've helped numerous customers migrate SQL Server workloads to Azure SQL, including Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Virtual Machines. In this article, I'll explain some of the challenges of optimizing the compute cost for an Azure SQL Database deployment and review how the serverless compute tier can greatly simplify it.

Active Directory (AD) is a foundational element of any Microsoft Windows environment because of the part it plays in authentication, access management, account management, and authorization. To ensure the health and efficiency of your Active Directory, it’s crucial for you to engage in proper Active Directory auditing and reporting best practices. This article will detail essential Active Directory auditing best practices and provide recommendations for the best Active Directory auditing tools.

System Administrators (SysAdmins) often represent the core of IT organizations. SysAdmins manage the organization's computing infrastructure, encompassing servers, virtualization, networking, and storage. For many years, the term System Administrator, or SysAdmin, was typically associated with Linux or UNIX systems.

Welcome to 2022! We hope it will be a great year. First, the team at SolarWinds® Pingdom® would like to thank all Pingdom users for their support and loyalty in 2021. Thank you for trusting us to monitor your websites, servers, and services in a more volatile internet ecosystem. And while we look back at 2021 web performance in review, we can’t wait to monitor, report, and analyze more online events in 2022.

At a time when so much of business is digitized, it’s becoming critically important for organizations to have a way to transfer large files over the internet without compromising security. While it may seem like the importance of these transfers would lead to an abundance of great large file transfer options, finding a quality large file transfer tool can be tricky.

A new study—the SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2021—suggests, although tech pros are confident with their work from home and remote work policies, agencies are at a critical inflection point as this confidence could create complacency or lead to security failures. Rather than potentially fall behind, here are five steps government agencies can take to combat security apathy and proactively manage cyber risk when we emerge from the pandemic. 1.

Back in the day, monitoring applications from end to end was—for the most part—significantly easier than it is today. Though the basics of instrumentation and observability for metrics like CPU, memory, and I/O throughput haven’t changed, the way applications are built has changed significantly. There were, at most, a handful of application servers and likely a single database server.