Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

To keep their applications and websites available and accessible, today’s businesses put a lot of emphasis on infrastructure monitoring to ensure their servers are healthy and running. Amid the hustle, many companies overlook the need to monitor a different aspect of their application: user experience.

Many years ago, in my earliest IT jobs in Omaha, Nebraska, I realized the field of data was going to continue to evolve and, as such, there would always be a need for people who worked with and understood data. Regardless of which industry someone worked in—financial, medical, governmental, transportation, or retail—someone would have to work with and maintain business data, or the business would fail. This realization led me into the world of databases and SQL Server.

IT environments are getting increasingly complex and can often straddle on-premises gear, private cloud, public and/or multi-cloud, and SaaS environments... oh, and it’s a moving target. Your legacy applications may have to reincarnate in one of these forms with minimal disruption. And when things go wrong, you need all the help and pointers you can get to identify the root source of the problem and what it’s impacting.

Log files are an important source of information about the state of an application and how it’s functioning. Therefore, log management and analysis are critical to application performance monitoring.

Over the past several years, I've helped numerous customers migrate SQL Server workloads to Azure SQL, including Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Virtual Machines. In this article, I'll explain some of the challenges of optimizing the compute cost for an Azure SQL Database deployment and review how the serverless compute tier can greatly simplify it.

Federal IT pros have historically had limited time and resources; this makes it crucial to find the source of application slowdowns or outages as quickly as possible. Database virtualization can help by allowing IT pros to separate the storage and application layers within the application stack more quickly, providing easier access to root-cause issues. An estimated 70% of databases are virtualized. Yet, the benefits of virtualized databases come with additional challenges.

As enterprise applications changed over time to serve different business needs and computer systems evolved from the monolithic architecture of mainframes into client-server and distributed systems, mechanisms for communications between different tiers of computer systems also had to develop.

Over the past several years, I've helped numerous customers migrate SQL Server workloads to Azure SQL, including Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance, and Azure SQL Virtual Machines. In this article, I'll explain some of the challenges of optimizing the compute cost for an Azure SQL Database deployment and review how the serverless compute tier can greatly simplify it.

Active Directory (AD) is a foundational element of any Microsoft Windows environment because of the part it plays in authentication, access management, account management, and authorization. To ensure the health and efficiency of your Active Directory, it’s crucial for you to engage in proper Active Directory auditing and reporting best practices. This article will detail essential Active Directory auditing best practices and provide recommendations for the best Active Directory auditing tools.