Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

October 2020

Why People, Processes, and Technology Cannot Change in Isolation

Since 2004, October has been designated by the National Cybersecurity Alliance as National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM). Immediately, the mind wanders to supercomputers creating unbreakable algorithms against adversaries with unlimited compute power. This virtual landscape is happening today, and the arms race on both sides is something we’ll have to grapple with for the foreseeable future.

5 Service Desk Tickets Sure to Keep You Awake at Night

It’s the witching hour and the night is cold. Something feels eerie—it seems calm, but you’re not sold. You turn your computer on and to your despair, Through the garishness of the screen It was sitting there. That service desk ticket. The one you thought was finally resolved But it’s back, and with a vengeance Ready to wreak havoc on all involved. This is just the beginning of your nightmare And the scariest part, you haven’t even read.

The Perfect World (Without Outages)

Heaven on Earth would be a world with no outages. No slow load times. No failed switches or routers. No bandwidth issues. Just peace and quiet. But if nothing were to go wrong on a daily basis, what would IT pros spend their time doing? Outages make up a large part of an IT pro’s job. Monitoring networks and finding the source of outages can be time-consuming and take away effort from other tasks.

Tips for Updating Your Cybersecurity Plan

Every year brings new opportunities for federal IT professionals to reduce risk by addressing threats—both existing and emerging—with new tools, technologies, and tactics. This year has proven to be a little different, with the emergence of COVID-19 forcing federal agencies to make the jump to remote work. Although the world at large is currently working from home, bad actors from criminals to nation-state actors are still working, too.

Doubling Down on Database Performance Management

How many applications do you use every day? On average, probably 20. Think about it—We use them to check email, to avoid traffic, to know if we need a coat, to order dinner, and to connect with friends and family. We use others to drive success for our organizations, to present new ideas, to close deals, and to take care of our customers. And this year, we used video conferencing apps to keep the world moving, streaming apps to keep ourselves sane, and online grocery apps.

6 Questions to Jumpstart Your IT Asset Management Strategy

IT asset management (ITAM) is a hot topic of 2020. Like almost everything else, managing lifecycle costs and minimizing risks has been a bit more complicated in recent months given the sudden shift to remote work and assets leaving the traditional workplace. It begs the question: are you maximizing the value from your current ITAM strategy? Let’s dive into this handy checklist of questions to help you answer the question above.

Can You Consistently Deliver the Digital Experience You've Promised?

If the users aren’t happy, then in short order, neither will anyone else be. The ubiquity of information technology has exposed users to the best the IT industry has to offer—and the worst. So, if end-user experience is king, how does one go about ensuring users stay happy? The short answer is application performance management (APM) tools. Users don’t care if the apps they use are in the cloud, on-premises, or something in between.

ipMonitor Free Edition: Essential IT Monitoring

SolarWinds® ipMonitor® is built to be quick, affordable, and agentless monitoring software for your network, servers, and applications. ipMonitor delivers out-of-the-box visibility into essential availability and performance metrics for your critical IT environment, and includes a built-in database and web server, so you don’t need to install anything but ipMonitor.

Why Monitor Third-Party Web Applications?

If you provide a web service or benefit from a provided service, there’s typically an agreement between the provider and customers to contractually bind the provider to meet a certain level of service, otherwise known as a Service Level Agreement (SLA). The provider needs to be sure they deliver quality site performance and they’re extremely reliable, at the risk of hurting their brand reputation and losing customers.

What Can Website Uptime History Tell You? (That You Don't Already Know)

According to a 2019 study conducted by Forrester, 44% of the IT directors surveyed indicated their organizations face unplanned downtime bimonthly. The study also estimated unplanned downtime costs 35% more per minute than planned downtime. If you’re an MSP, a failure to meet SLAs for uptime can lead to even higher costs and penalties.

APM Integrated Experience

We’ve been listening to our customers. Whether you’re a SolarWinds® Loggly® or SolarWinds AppOptics™ user, we’ve been working hard to make your life easier. We’re happy to announce a brand-new experience that brings together metrics, traces, and logs in a single platform, making it faster and easier to troubleshoot application and infrastructure issues.

What Can Website Uptime History Tell You? (That You Don't Already Know)

According to a 2019 study conducted by Forrester, 44% of the IT directors surveyed indicated their organizations face unplanned downtime bimonthly. The study also estimated unplanned downtime costs 35% more per minute than planned downtime. If you’re an MSP, a failure to meet SLAs for uptime can lead to even higher costs and penalties.

How Network Telemetry Is Becoming the New Normal

The work being done on federal, state, and local levels to ensure the health of society during and post-COVID-19 will be driven by the Internet of Things (IoT). From contact tracing to drones, the reopening of America will be regulated by millions of data streams delivered from thousands of connection points. IT practitioners will be tasked with making sense of all the information coming across their screens. Different devices produce different types of data streams and logs.

Tried and True Tech Tips

Anyone who’s worked in IT knows a great deal of the day-to-day work doesn’t come down to one secret trick—the job consists mainly of stringing together hard-won wisdom and convenient Google searches to solve problems. Working in IT is a little like parenting; when you’re first told you need to pick up your children’s LEGO bricks every day, you say, “Really? Is it really necessary to do it every single day?” But you only have to step on one at 1 a.m.

Lift the Haze of the Cloud With These 6 Considerations

Gartner says when COVID-19 hit the United States in March, 88% of businesses mandated or strongly encouraged employees to work from home. Sales, marketing, human resources, and most other business operations were all conducted from somewhere outside of the office. This drastic move required IT to accommodate employees in an entirely new way than what they had become accustomed to.

Using rKubeLog Collector for Aggregated Log Centralization

Debugging and resolving incidents in nodeless environments can be difficult, time-consuming, and most of all, frustrating. Exporting your logs from these ephemeral and disparate services to a centrally aggregated log is a great way to correlate information, quickly resolve incidents, and make your life a little easier.

Building a Zero-Trust Model With SolarWinds Security Tools - SolarWinds Lab Episode #92

The zero-trust model is critical for building a successful strategy to detect both internal and external cybersecurity threats. This approach requires setting and maintaining strict access controls and "no trust" as the default to all, including those already inside your network. There are several steps needed to properly evaluate your organization's current state before you can start implementing best practices.

How To Do Bulk Firmware Updates With NCM

As a network engineer, you're responsible for the uptime and stability of network infrastructure. One of the keys to keeping a happy and healthy network is making sure the devices are running firmware free of bugs and known issues. It may be tedious, but it's still relatively easy to do firmware upgrades if you only have one or two devices. But now, most environments have dozens of devices deployed at remote sites and branch offices. If you need to do a firmware upgrade on all of those, it's a whole different matter. This is where Network Configuration Manager can help by automating the normally manual process of firmware upgrades.

Why You Need Security Operations

A fully grown security operations center (SOC) was, until recently, a luxury, affordable for the largest organizations only, but even in global players, budget constraints are real. Unfortunately, the willingness to raise money for security seems to require an incident first. However, we often forget there’s no need for a dedicated war room, and it doesn’t always require a full team. Centralized security can be outsourced.

7 Tips to Make Digital Performance Monitoring More Effective

A poorly performing website or web application hurts the end-user experience and can result in lost revenue and customers. That’s why businesses seek better tools and processes to simplify digital performance monitoring to expedite detection and troubleshooting of performance issues. There are numerous website performance and availability monitoring tools available for this purpose.

Using SolarWinds Loggly With MongoDB New Structured Logs

Last month, MongoDB released v4.4 of their database; the new release contains several changes and improvements, but the introduction of structured JSON logging caught our eye, which makes it easier to extract valuable insights from the logs using products like SolarWinds® Loggly®. In this post, we’ll review how to get started sending your MongoDB logs to Loggly and some of the insights you can easily get from your server logs when you upgrade to the latest version.

Frequently Asked Questions About Application Performance

Digital transformation is changing the way companies do business, putting pressure on IT to continually monitor and manage the performance of applications delivering business-critical services. IT managers are responsible for making sure applications in today’s increasingly complex IT environment are running as fast and efficiently as possible. Poorly performing applications must be optimized for companies to leverage the benefits of digital transformation.

Go HAM on Your ITAM Strategy by Avoiding These 6 Mistakes

Okay, now we have you thinking about ham and that delicious holiday meal on the horizon. While not quite as delicious, hardware asset management, or HAM, is something IT should have on its plate this season. “What would it cost to replace all the desktops and laptops in your organization?” A hypothetical question posed on a recent webcast by Jon Hauser, IT director at the University of Washington School of Social Work.

Checklist for Application Performance and Availability

Given the increasing complexity of network architecture and IT infrastructure, application performance management (APM) solutions have become a critical element in the toolbox of IT managers, DevOps, and developers. And, for good reasons. APM can pay handsome dividends in terms of quickly resolving bandwidth constraints, availability issues, and enhancing the credibility of your business.

Quick and Easy Way to Implement Kubernetes Logging

The SolarWinds® Papertrail™ team is excited to announce SolarWinds rKubeLog, an open-source project designed to streamline Kubernetes logging. rKubeLog allows you to forward logs to Papertrail from within a Kubernetes cluster without using a daemon or setting up application-level logging or a logging sidecar. rKubeLog is a quick and easy way to implement logging for applications running in Kubernetes clusters.

All About Trust

One of the biggest roadblocks for getting anyone to listen to what you want them to do is trust, or more accurately, a lack of trust. You could say we’re facing an unprecedented trust deficit in every aspect of life due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Who can we trust to tell us what to do? And can we trust them to do the right thing? This lack of trust can even make us question the motives of those whom we may have trusted in the past.

Drupal vs. Joomla: Web Performance Compared

Most companies build a resilient system capable of constantly supporting their revenue-generating web applications. However, unforeseen circumstances can occur at any time and cause downtime, making a website unavailable for end users. To ensure a reliable website, it’s important to monitor its availability and performance. Reducing a website’s load time is one of the best ways to provide a seamless user experience.

How to Monitor, Manage, and Secure Active Directory

Microsoft Active Directory (AD) is the nerve center enabling your federal agency to access the systems and applications staff members need to do their jobs. AD is also a high-risk target for inside and outside threats and can be a gateway for other potential security vulnerabilities. The key to protecting your agency’s AD is to have the right processes in place to maintain its integrity, know whether something is happening that shouldn’t be, and demonstrate compliance if required.

Remote Support Software for MSPs

As MSPs work to support customers in 2020, they face a unique set of challenges—which is why they need dependable and robust remote support software designed specifically for their requirements. As the workforce becomes increasingly remote, it is crucial that managed service providers (MSPs) adapt their business practices to accommodate this change and properly support their customers.

3 Critical Data Points to IT Asset Tracking

As companies grow and mature, it’s easy to feel trapped in an IT asset mud pit. IT pros faced with increasing numbers of users, more complex systems, and a variety of vendor products can lose track of IT assets, let maintenance slide, and run into compatibility issues. This is especially true in the current remote work and virtual school environments. In order to simplify IT asset tracking, it’s important to monitor three critical data points.