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Latest Posts

Un-Excuse-ing Upgrades

When we talk about upgrades here at SolarWinds, we spend a lot of time discussing the beneficial features, performance, and capabilities you can gain. That’s not by accident. The honest-to-goodness truth is, the most compelling reason to upgrade ANYTHING—from our phone to our game console to our monitoring software—is because we’ll be able to do something both new and useful to us.

The Case for Cost Containment With Professional Services and Staff Augmentation

At the start of our enterprise cost containment series, Leon examined what cost containment is and why IT pros should care. Basically, you should care how your projects and work affect the business’s bottom line and should understand enough about it that you can communicate effectively with management. Even though you may not think about the business in this way most of the time, it directly affects your job.

The IT Skills Gap-A Downside of Innovation

Innovation is widely accepted to be a great thing—think of all the new products, technologies, methodologies, services, etc. unveiled at any given time. At this point, you’re probably thinking, "This all sounds great! Why would someone be writing about a downside of innovation?" Innovation is great when it pushes the boundaries of what can be achieved and inspires people to build upon things others have built or dreamed of. But innovation is useless without adoption.

Security Starts With People, Unfortunately.

One of the findings of our investigations pointed to a compromised account as a possible cause of the cyberoperation. While I was reading the results, I thought, “That could have been me. In fact, it could have been any of our employees,” and I began asking myself what I as an individual could do to increase the security of the company I’m working for. Let’s face it, most of the risk is produced by us humans and our behavior.

Application Performance Management 101

To stay alive and growing, tech organizations are always on the hunt for ways to increase the quality and stability of their applications and services. Doing so is essential if they want to prevent their customers from becoming their competitors’ customers, after all. This post is all about a specific process organizations can—and should—use to increase the availability and performance of their offerings and delight their customers: application performance management (APM).

Hybrid IT and Virtualized Workloads Preparing for a Shift to Microsoft Azure

Though government agencies continue to move to the cloud to accelerate their digital transformation plans, the majority have embraced a hybrid IT environment. This mix of on-premises and cloud implementations highlights the need for comprehensive, full-stack visibility across the entire hybrid IT environment. Without a broad view, agencies may not be able to see their cloud environment as clearly as they see what’s in the data center.

Using Dokku On DigitalOcean

Dokku can be a cost-effective, convenient way to deploy apps to DigitalOcean. SolarWinds® Papertrail™ can make monitoring the logs of those apps simple and frustration-free. Combine these two technologies and you have an effective deployment process and log management system. Let’s look at Dokku first. Dokku is an open-source platform-as-a-service (PaaS). If you’re familiar with Heroku, you can consider Dokku a private Heroku that you manage.

A DBA's Habits for Success: CMMI (Part One)

Finding the perfect flow for your business can take time and patience. Like almost anything else in life, a business must go through stages of maturity before it reaches its final form and only requires regular maintenance. In this five-part series, we’ll dive into Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and what phases businesses and their DBAs must go through to successfully manage IT as a business.

Securing Azure SQL Database, Part 3: Service Endpoints

In previous installments of my “Securing Azure SQL Database” series, I covered Azure SQL Database firewall rules and private endpoints—the first of which is a way to help reduce the public exposure of your database endpoint and the second being a means to remove all public access if necessary. Each option has unique benefits, and some scenarios might call for a mix of the two options.

Optimizing Load Times on Apache Web Server on Digital Ocean With SolarWinds Pingdom

Introduction We all want the fastest application possible for our customers. At the same time, we’re under pressure to continuously add new features. These new features add complexity, which makes our application heavier, which in turn slows our applications down. So, how do we add new features, yet keep the performance of our application high?