In today’s technology-driven world, network automation tools have evolved from convenience to necessity in practically every IT field. Traditionally, IT managers would issue manual command lines to manage networks, but given the size of today’s business networks, manual workflows dealing with repetitive network tasks have become time-consuming and counterproductive, often at risk of incurring errors from manual implementation.

There’s a big difference between the MySQL database powering your internet of things (IoT) lightbulb and the one powering your website. There’s a chasm between the SQL Server Express database in your lightly used application’s VM and the monster multi-region SQL cluster you have running on Microsoft Azure. This kind of database diversity is everywhere today. But what are the differences between these databases, and how can administrators justify database spend?

First, thanks for indulging the clickbait title joke. Serialization is the unsung hero of harmonizing network and application relations and deserves the occasional, snarky callout. Moreover, identifying how the unique mix of network clients in your environment consume your carefully manicured infrastructure is critical for managing network cost. Because today, a rapidly expanding, diverse pile of new technologies all assume the network is a magic grid, no tuning required.

You’ve solved database performance monitoring and documentation. Unfortunately, now you get lost between them.

How a software product feels is easy to overlook, but how the product works matters just as much, if not more. Results from digital experience monitoring point to how apps feel as the key determinant of their success. “That’s how it is with people. Nobody cares how it works as long as it works.” This famous line from The Matrix Reloaded (2003) resonates with the way many developers approach maintaining apps. Someone has to keep watch.

According to Dr. Stephen Hawking and the conservation of quantum information theory, information can neither be created nor destroyed… unless you work in IT. OK, he didn’t really say the part about IT; I did. In the physical world, information is constantly generated, curated, and consumed—from emails to cat videos to this blog post. Not to mention error messages, system logs, and alert emails you never read.

Hosting your application on DigitalOcean is an easy way for teams to deploy and scale applications without worrying about the details of the infrastructure. But what happens when your application starts causing bottlenecks and you need to track down the root cause? In this article, we’ll look at how SolarWinds® AppOptics™ works together with DigitalOcean to help you identify and fix performance issues with your application.