Change isn’t without its detractors in terms of people and systems. A misstep in expanding application performance monitoring (APM) across full-stack application monitoring can result in the degradation of availability and performance, stopping a digital transformation effort in its tracks. Avoid this at all costs. Deploying a full-scale digital transformation is a vast undertaking well beyond the scope of this brief article.

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.

Errors and bugs are a nightmare for any software engineer or developer. Even though errors can seem like a bad experience for any developer or website owner, errors can help improve the quality of a website. You may be wondering, “But how?” Errors pinpoint the weaker parts of the website, giving you direction of what to work on.

2020 keeps on proving the old adage, “It gets worse before it gets better.” We still seem to be in the “worse” stage. If you’ve been paying attention to the news—and I don’t blame you if you’ve been taking a break for sanity’s sake—you might have noticed (in addition to the reports about the pandemic and social issues) hacks and general security breaches have been ramping up.

Cloud computing can be more complex than anticipated, particularly as agencies continue to move applications and operations into a cloud environment. Does your federal IT team have the in-house skills to ensure cloud computing is helping your agency rather than draining its money and resources?

In a perfect world, how would like to learn about a problem? If you’re like the development team here at SolarWinds® Papertrail™, none of these options sound good. We’d all prefer to be notified when something starts to fail, but before there’s a service impact. At a minimum, we want to know the instant a service or application goes down. Fortunately, Papertrail has some powerful and easy-to-use alerting capabilities.

When IT professionals change jobs, it isn’t always a smooth and easy transition. Let’s say you worked somewhere else for a couple of years and got used to the environment you worked in. It was your kitchen; you knew what was in each drawer and where to put everything away. And even though the technology will be the same at your new job (the network is the network, after all), there will still be significant differences.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about why you don’t need a blockchain. Blockchain is one long transaction log that always gets written to and is never backed up. It’s a ledger, more or less, with some math. And while distributed ledgers can be useful for some scenarios, I’m here today to say you still don’t need a blockchain. What turns a distributed ledger into a blockchain is cryptography for creating a digital signature to reduce the risk of data tampering.

A lot happened last quarter, so you might have missed a few of the shiny new features now included with SolarWinds® AppOptics™. Don’t worry, we rounded up the recent updates here so you can get the most out of your application performance monitoring (APM) with AppOptics. Simplified Application Root Cause and Service- and Trace-Level Root Cause Summary Views The new service- and trace-level views expand the types of IT professionals who can use AppOptics.

Class is almost in session, and this year will look very different than it did in years past. Depending on the state and district, school officials have decided to continue virtual learning or put safety plans in place for in-person learning. In any case, technology will be the backbone for successful learning in 2020. Schools’ IT departments will be integral in ensuring students and teachers have reliable devices and easy access to software applications to start and finish the year strong.

Modern application development requires more work to ensure the development path and the data it produces are fully in sync, secure, optimized, and error-free. This responsibility has increasingly fallen upon application developers. They’re being asked to double as database administrators to maintain fluidity in the process and support an agency’s rapid release cycle.

With one of the largest threats to a company’s security and privacy being its own employees, having employees work remotely only adds to the risk. While this year’s Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report chalks it up to internal errors rather than intentional malice, the threat remains. Many corporations have sent employees to work from the confines of their homes, creating a greater need for protection against data and security breaches.