Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Historically, there was a clear delineation between what system administrators (SysAdmins) do and what application developers are responsible for in IT organizations. In recent years—especially in organizations focused on software development—these worlds have come together as IT operations and development teams adopt DevOps practices. The concept of site reliability engineering (SRE) was first introduced by a much-discussed book titled Site Reliability Engineering from Google.

If you look back to the state of technology only a few decades ago, you’ll stumble upon a technological world full of silos and frustration. Two of an organization’s most vital teams—software development and IT operations—struggled to communicate effectively. Departments resided within silos, and development and testing were conducted at a snail’s pace.

To keep their applications and websites available and accessible, today’s businesses put a lot of emphasis on infrastructure monitoring to ensure their servers are healthy and running. Amid the hustle, many companies overlook the need to monitor a different aspect of their application: user experience.

As an architect at SolarWinds, it's essential to work with our own monitoring tools as a form of quality control and source for innovation. As one of the largest players in the IT monitoring and management world, we're always thinking about ways to make it seamless for customers to work across our suite of tools. One of those tools I'll focus on today is SolarWinds® Loggly®—our log management and analytics product, which is also a part of our APM integrated experience.

As a customer success engineer, I hear directly from customers about what issues they need help solving with SolarWinds SQL Sentry®. This insight first motivated me to create posts for the SQL Sentry Tips & Tricks series, which explains how to get the most out of SQL Sentry. Now, I’d like to create more tutorials about what I consider to be one of the most powerful features in SQL Sentry: Advisory Conditions.

At SolarWinds, we believe security should be a core competency of all organizations. The December 2020 SUNBURST cyberattack on the SolarWinds software build environment emphasized a concerning new reality for the software industry and illuminated the increasingly sophisticated threats made by outside nation-states to the supply chains and infrastructure on which we all rely.

As an architect at SolarWinds, it’s essential to work with our own monitoring tools as a form of quality control and source for innovation. As one of the largest players in the IT monitoring and management world, we’re always thinking about ways to make it seamless for customers to work across our suite of tools. One of those tools I’ll focus on today is SolarWinds® Loggly®—our log management and analytics product, which is also a part of our APM integrated experience.

Back in the early days of Microsoft SQL Server, database administrators had few resources to draw upon and learn from. In the ’90s, we had SQL Server Professional, edited by Karen Watterson. We had CompuServe forums for SQL Server and Sybase. We had Microsoft documentation, which meant three printed books with no books online.

SolarWinds® Loggly® was built to cut through large volumes of noisy log data to quickly pinpoint the exact events relevant to your search. Whether your log data is structured into neat field and value pairs which lend themselves to precise search queries or written in unstructured text blobs, Loggly enables you to extract meaningful insights from your logs—even if you’re not a query master.

Log files are an important source of information about the state of an application and how it’s functioning. Therefore, log management and analysis are critical to application performance monitoring.