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.

Welcome back! As we enter the halfway point of this five-part series, we’ll discuss Level 3 of the capability maturity model (CMM) and the role it plays in helping DBAs grow their organization and increase the functionality of their business. By now you should be familiar with the definition of CMM and the Information Maturity Model (IMMM). If you need a refresher, part one and two of this series cover the basics of the models and the overall benefits of following a maturity model.

If you’ve ever encountered a slow file download or a frozen/lagging video, you’ve experienced packet loss. Under certain circumstances, these might be minor inconveniences, but packet loss on a larger scale can be financially detrimental to businesses. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to diagnose and reduce packet loss. In this article, we provide some background on why packet loss occurs before sharing five of the best network monitoring solutions on the market to combat the issue.

To many developers and system administrators—and even to some database administrators—database engines are a black box. They’re complex pieces of software that, in some cases, even have their own operating systems—the database engine manages its own memory, reads and writes to disks, and handles numerous other system functions. In this post, you’ll learn about a specific feature of database engines—query optimization.