Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Knowledge management is a cornerstone of IT service management (ITSM). It provides technical guidance, steps to best troubleshoot issues, and in some cases an outlet to expand on tribal knowledge. Not only can knowledge content help drive self-service and employee empowerment, aiding in case deflection, but it can also serve as an extension of your organization’s culture.

As a consumer, you most likely can agree that the overall experience in the buying process is equally, if not more, important than the product or service itself. Forbes actually says 73% of consumers say a good experience is key in influencing their brand loyalties. A haircut, a fancy meal, or a new pair of shoes were nice, but what if the hairstylist, waiter, or sales associate was rude to you? What if they weren’t attentive and treated you as if you were dispensable to the business?

Thousands of teams use SolarWinds® Papertrail™ to manage different types of logs. And with such a large and diverse group of users, there’s a wide variety of needs and preferences. Fortunately, we added a Display Preferences menu to the footer in the new Papertrail event viewer, allowing us to create and deliver new display options and color themes. If you’ve opened the Display Preferences menu this week, you may have noticed two new color themes: Solarized and Solarized Light.

Mobile working is becoming the reality for an increasing number of public sector staff. But the threat and impact brought by the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak has seen many organizations instructing office-based employees to work remotely, as a way to minimize the risk of infection and spreading of the virus.

With the state of the world today, healthcare facilities of all kinds and sizes are operating under a state of distress. Employees are working on the frontlines, while also having to manage low budgets for IT security, coupled with low resources and all the while having to manage legal and compliance issues on top of it. Sometimes there’s so much emphasis put on the primary platform where patient health information (PHI) resides, other parts of the network are overlooked to determine compliance.

Quality service and providing value to service desk users is a sure way to boost employee engagement. In fact, if employees aren’t satisfied with their requests and providers aren’t finding ways to improve their experience, what purpose does the service desk have? Service level management (SLM) holds IT pros accountable for services they’re providing to customers. But a common problem that arises from this strategy is fulfilling the parameters set within service level agreements (SLAs).

The healthcare ecosystem is complex, and the diversity of the different departments and devices results in a multifaceted IT infrastructure that can be hard to manage. With increasing digitalization, healthcare institutions are also at increased risk of becoming victims of viruses, Trojans, and myriad other cyberattacks. The goal is usually to access the confidential data in the patient file for either financial purposes or malicious intent or damage the critical infrastructure itself.

We’re excited to announce the new Log Usage Dashboard designed to provide greater visibility into your log data volume consumption. This dashboard gives you in-depth visibility into your total log volume usage, so you can better manage—and optimize—your plan usage.

Accidental DBA is a term most IT pros are familiar with, and traditionally it describes an “on-top task” for the SysAdmin. It was followed by the “involuntary security admin,” a task carried out by network admins, as back in the days it was all about securing the perimeter. Now there are the clouds, but whose responsibility is it? Surely the SysAdmin again, as it’s just about infrastructure? But then there’s VPNs and BGP and load balancers—network territory!

When COVID-19 hit in the spring and schools quickly transitioned to remote learning, we saw in real-time how important IT departments in education are. It was IT’s quick thinking that helped administrators, teachers, and students continue in their learning environments. Now that the ‘20-’21 school year is ramping up, it’s important that IT leaders in education continue on the path to success and plan for the expected and unexpected.