Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Welcome back! We’re nearing the end of our five-part series, and I hope you’ve gotten the information you need as a DBA to mature your business. In this part of the series, we’ll discuss Level 4 and the importance of servicing customers and teams with the skills acquired in levels one, two, and three.

Since Microsoft first introduced the Always On Availability Groups (AGs) feature in SQL Server 2012, there’s been a lot of interest in using AGs for both high availability and disaster recovery (HADR), as well as for offloading read-only workloads.

"Who has access to sensitive financial data in our organization?" Assuming you have a definition of what "sensitive financial data" means for your organization, can you easily answer this question? If you needed to perform an audit to verify only the appropriate people have access, what actions would you take?

You can add an action to log messages to Papertrail, a cloud-based logging service. You can send logs from Kiwi Syslog Server, or other servers or applications that can connect to the Internet. Then monitor, search, react to, and archive your messages on Papertrail.

The classic event viewer, introduced in June 2011, has been the heart of SolarWinds® Papertrail™. It’s where we spend most of our time, searching, tailing, and sharing event data. Over the last 10 years, Papertrail fans across the globe have shared their ideas with our development team and helped us improve and refine the event viewer.

Today, SolarWinds announced our expanded database performance management portfolio. With the recent acquisition of SentryOne and launch of Database Insights for SQL Server alongside our award-winning Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) and Database Performance Monitor (DPM) solutions, we intend to become the leader in the database performance management market.

You’re going to run into network issues during normal operations—in part because so many kinds of errors can cause noticeable problems in your network. Identifying the root cause of each issue is critical and to do so successfully, you want to make sure you have the right network troubleshooting solutions in your arsenal before wading in. This helps ensure you have a clear understanding of the scope of the problem before you attempt any network troubleshooting steps.

Traditional systems monitoring solutions poll various counters (typically simple network management protocol [SNMP]), pull in data and react to it. If an issue requiring attention is found, an event is triggered—perhaps an email to an administrator or the firing of an alert. The admin subsequently responds as needed. This centralized pull approach is resource-intensive. Due to the pull nature of the requests, it results in data gaps and data that may not be granular enough.