If you hang out around a particular segment of the SolarWinds® crowd, you’re likely to hear the story of how monitoring helped one former Head Geek™ score front row tickets to Aerosmith. This is not that story. This story was, however, inspired by that story. The original story involved the aforementioned Head Geek, Destiny Bertucci, using SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM) to monitor the ticket sales website.

Developers are the kingmakers. Millions of decisions made by tens of thousands of developers are ultimately responsible for the triumph or tragedy of IT. Developers for commercial vendors, open-source projects, cloud and software as a service (SaaS) solutions, managed service providers (MSPs), and internal teams make most technology decisions far upstream from IT pros. This essentially defines ops’ role as the crew who finds a way to make washing machines fly in formation.

Most of us have encountered a situation like the following at some point in our careers: something either isn’t working right or could be working better. You’ve been through the process to understand the problem and identify solutions. (Check out my blog post “4 Steps to Efficiently Solve Problems” if you’re still working on understanding the problem.) Now it’s time to pick a solution—and you can’t get stakeholders to agree on one.

When we talk about upgrades here at SolarWinds, we spend a lot of time discussing the beneficial features, performance, and capabilities you can gain. That’s not by accident. The honest-to-goodness truth is, the most compelling reason to upgrade ANYTHING—from our phone to our game console to our monitoring software—is because we’ll be able to do something both new and useful to us.

At the start of our enterprise cost containment series, Leon examined what cost containment is and why IT pros should care. Basically, you should care how your projects and work affect the business’s bottom line and should understand enough about it that you can communicate effectively with management. Even though you may not think about the business in this way most of the time, it directly affects your job.

Innovation is widely accepted to be a great thing—think of all the new products, technologies, methodologies, services, etc. unveiled at any given time. At this point, you’re probably thinking, "This all sounds great! Why would someone be writing about a downside of innovation?" Innovation is great when it pushes the boundaries of what can be achieved and inspires people to build upon things others have built or dreamed of. But innovation is useless without adoption.

One of the findings of our investigations pointed to a compromised account as a possible cause of the cyberoperation. While I was reading the results, I thought, “That could have been me. In fact, it could have been any of our employees,” and I began asking myself what I as an individual could do to increase the security of the company I’m working for. Let’s face it, most of the risk is produced by us humans and our behavior.

To stay alive and growing, tech organizations are always on the hunt for ways to increase the quality and stability of their applications and services. Doing so is essential if they want to prevent their customers from becoming their competitors’ customers, after all. This post is all about a specific process organizations can—and should—use to increase the availability and performance of their offerings and delight their customers: application performance management (APM).