If you have a website, you should know about search engine optimization (SEO) and page speed. You may even have wondered about balancing page speed vs. SEO. From a user perspective, page speed matters to you personally because you get frustrated when you click a link and nothing appears to happen or when it takes ages before any information appears. But does it matter when it comes to SEO? Good question.

With DigitalOcean Monitoring, you can collect metrics for visibility, monitor Droplet performance, and receive alerts when problems arise in your infrastructure. Many users often want to extend this infrastructure monitoring with application-level monitoring. This means debugging issues requires expertise, familiarity with your product and infrastructure, and often the involvement of many people in various fields—all to chase down a single problem.

A cloud-first strategy can feel like a big jump from traditional setups. One of the benefits of a hybrid or on-premises strategy is you feel like you’re in control. You and your team know where your critical servers live. You can touch them. Your team understands your security processes, and you can easily verify security personnel follow them. Those are all significant benefits. However, a growing number of software teams are choosing to move to cloud-first strategies.

If you’re already using or planning to use AWS Lambda to run code without provisioning or managing servers, you’ll want to monitor your serverless applications with the new SolarWinds® AppOptics™ Lambda forwarder and APM agents. If you’re not using AWS Lambda, here’s what you need to know—it’s an event-driven, serverless computing platform by Amazon Web Services.

With IT technology continuing to rapidly evolve, networks are becoming increasingly complicated, sophisticated, and sizable. The accelerating growth rate of network technology is caused in part by the increased adoption of IoT, the cloud, and software-defined networking. In this environment, where technology is advancing with overwhelming speed, enterprises must adapt and be agile enough to manage network configurations for all their connected devices.

Performance reporting is an essential part of everything IT does, and the help desk is no different. But help desk reporting and metrics are particular to each organization. Ticket volume and incident types often depend on the nature of the business, and IT help desk managers must select a set of reporting criteria that helps monitor the unique value that their team provides. As this post will cover, there are some universal truths in help desk reporting.

Federal IT pros are experts at using quick fixes to keep costs down and save time, often because there’s no other option. They essentially leap from crisis to crisis instead of future-proofing the agency’s IT environment. Paying down technical debt is neither easy nor glamorous, but without this paydown, you’re creating a cyclical panic. For example, when you’re in technical debt, you run with what you’ve got until it breaks; when it breaks, you panic.

Application performance monitoring (APM) is one of the main monitoring techniques used in tech organizations. Performance is an essential attribute of applications and shouldn’t be overlooked. Our topic for today’s post can be considered both a subset and a complement of APM: SQL Server performance monitoring. We’ll start by covering some basics. We’ll define APM and why it’s so important.

As we enter 2021, we’re seeing a renewed focus on user experience (UX). Whereas user experience was first limited to a UX designer, it encompasses so much more nowadays. User experience has become a business mentality, where everyone in a company can make a positive contribution to user experience. This article explores different tips to boost your e-commerce website’s user experience.

As we enter 2021, we’re seeing a renewed focus on user experience (UX). Whereas user experience was first limited to a UX designer, it encompasses so much more nowadays. User experience has become a business mentality, where everyone in a company can make a positive contribution to user experience. Some examples include the following: This article explores different tips to boost your e-commerce website’s user experience.

Kubernetes work queues are a great way to manage the prioritization and execution of long-running or expensive menial tasks. DigitalOcean managed Kubernetes services makes deploying a work queue straightforward. But what happens when your work queues don’t operate the way you expect? SolarWinds® Papertrail™ advanced log management complements the monitoring tools provided by DigitalOcean and simplifies both the debugging and root cause analysis process.

This post’s mission is to answer what seems to be a simple question: “What is log analysis?” It doesn’t seem too hard to answer, right? Obviously from the name log analysis is the process of analyzing log entries. Case closed? Can we finish the post here? Well, not so fast.

While managers may not be the most technical colleagues in the building—or online, in the case of 2020—dismissing their lack of monitoring knowledge isn’t always helpful. Managers who understand the tasks their teams deal with daily can be a great asset to any company. But how can we know what managers need to know to sound like monitoring experts? Simple. Just ask.

Microsoft Azure has become the go-to cloud computing service for over 95% of Fortune 500 companies—and for good reason. Azure’s flexible and scalable cloud environment offers a secure off-premises solution for your business IT infrastructure, without the need to manage physical servers in your changing IT infrastructure. Azure allows you to manage servers, databases, applications, and more, all from one of Microsoft’s secure global cloud storage sites.

The past year has emphasized the importance of digital experience, especially in service delivery. For organizations forced to adopt flexible remote work policies, the IT help desk has been instrumental in business continuity. If end users in your organization are still struggling to find the necessary resources to support their technology, or if IT is still adjusting to the influx of tickets and requests, it may be time to evaluate the foundation of your strategy.

SolarWinds® Pingdom® is an external synthetic monitoring agent designed to monitor your systems from the outside in. If you know what clues to look for, it can provide a great place to triage where a problem is occurring in the system. So how does a Pingdom call work, and how can you use it to debug what’s happening inside the system?

So SolarWinds® Pingdom® has alerted you to an issue—what do you do now? In this article, I’ll explain the features and capabilities of a full monitoring stack in SolarWinds and how you can use it to get to the bottom of a 3 a.m. Pingdom wake-up call. The Setup For our web service, we use a simple architecture of a front-end Flask application with a Postgres back end served behind an edge SSL-terminating NGINX instance on the DigitalOcean Managed Kubernetes service.

SolarWinds® AppOptics™ was designed from the ground up as a SaaS-based APM tool for cloud-native and traditional IT implementations. It provides out-of-the-box monitoring for applications and infrastructure through simple-to-install APM libraries and host agents. AppOptics makes it easy for multiple teams to quickly assess the health and performance of your applications regardless of how or where they are implemented.

First off, what is synthetic monitoring? What if synthetic monitoring meant monitoring whether or not something is real or fake…watch out Kardashians! Jokes aside, no, synthetic monitoring doesn’t monitor celebrity plastic surgery decisions. Synthetic monitoring is a kind of website performance monitoring that simulates user interactions with a site. A great synthetic monitoring tool instantly alerts you when an issue is encountered.

NGINX is one of the most popular web servers. According to nginx.com, it powers more than 400 million websites. It is, however, probably even more commonly used as a reverse proxy. Since it acts as a go-between for your application and your users, it’s important to properly monitor NGINX metrics. Sometimes you may find yourself trying to understand some performance degradation of the application while an issue may come from NGINX itself.

IT software technology is advancing at a rapid pace, with the internet of things, cloud, automation, and machine learning making networks and network management activities more complex and interdependent. As networks grow and become more complicated, it’s increasingly important for administrators to have access to the tools necessary to conduct essential network monitoring and management operations. One such tool is a network mapper, also known as a network topology mapper.

Kubernetes work queues are a great way to manage the prioritization and execution of long-running or expensive menial tasks, such as processing large volumes of employee migration to a new system, ranking and sorting all the planets in the universe by Twitter tags, or even post-processing every frame of the latest Avengers movie.