Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Every year brings new opportunities for federal IT professionals to reduce risk by addressing threats—both existing and emerging—with new tools, technologies, and tactics. This year has proven to be a little different, with the emergence of COVID-19 forcing federal agencies to make the jump to remote work. Although the world at large is currently working from home, bad actors from criminals to nation-state actors are still working, too.

How many applications do you use every day? On average, probably 20. Think about it—We use them to check email, to avoid traffic, to know if we need a coat, to order dinner, and to connect with friends and family. We use others to drive success for our organizations, to present new ideas, to close deals, and to take care of our customers. And this year, we used video conferencing apps to keep the world moving, streaming apps to keep ourselves sane, and online grocery apps.

IT asset management (ITAM) is a hot topic of 2020. Like almost everything else, managing lifecycle costs and minimizing risks has been a bit more complicated in recent months given the sudden shift to remote work and assets leaving the traditional workplace. It begs the question: are you maximizing the value from your current ITAM strategy? Let’s dive into this handy checklist of questions to help you answer the question above.

We’ve been listening to our customers. Whether you’re a SolarWinds® Loggly® or SolarWinds AppOptics™ user, we’ve been working hard to make your life easier. We’re happy to announce a brand-new experience that brings together metrics, traces, and logs in a single platform, making it faster and easier to troubleshoot application and infrastructure issues.

According to a 2019 study conducted by Forrester, 44% of the IT directors surveyed indicated their organizations face unplanned downtime bimonthly. The study also estimated unplanned downtime costs 35% more per minute than planned downtime. If you’re an MSP, a failure to meet SLAs for uptime can lead to even higher costs and penalties.

If the users aren’t happy, then in short order, neither will anyone else be. The ubiquity of information technology has exposed users to the best the IT industry has to offer—and the worst. So, if end-user experience is king, how does one go about ensuring users stay happy? The short answer is application performance management (APM) tools. Users don’t care if the apps they use are in the cloud, on-premises, or something in between.

If you provide a web service or benefit from a provided service, there’s typically an agreement between the provider and customers to contractually bind the provider to meet a certain level of service, otherwise known as a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The provider needs to be sure they deliver quality site performance and they’re extremely reliable, at the risk of hurting their brand reputation and losing customers.

According to a 2019 study conducted by Forrester, 44% of the IT directors surveyed indicated their organizations face unplanned downtime bimonthly. The study also estimated unplanned downtime costs 35% more per minute than planned downtime. If you’re an MSP, a failure to meet SLAs for uptime can lead to even higher costs and penalties.

The work being done on federal, state, and local levels to ensure the health of society during and post-COVID-19 will be driven by the Internet of Things (IoT). From contact tracing to drones, the reopening of America will be regulated by millions of data streams delivered from thousands of connection points. IT practitioners will be tasked with making sense of all the information coming across their screens. Different devices produce different types of data streams and logs.

Anyone who’s worked in IT knows a great deal of the day-to-day work doesn’t come down to one secret trick—the job consists mainly of stringing together hard-won wisdom and convenient Google searches to solve problems. Working in IT is a little like parenting; when you’re first told you need to pick up your children’s LEGO bricks every day, you say, “Really? Is it really necessary to do it every single day?” But you only have to step on one at 1 a.m.