If you’ve ever encountered a slow file download or a frozen/lagging video, you’ve experienced packet loss. Under certain circumstances, these might be minor inconveniences, but packet loss on a larger scale can be financially detrimental to businesses. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to diagnose and reduce packet loss. In this article, we provide some background on why packet loss occurs before sharing five of the best network monitoring solutions on the market to combat the issue.

To many developers and system administrators—and even to some database administrators—database engines are a black box. They’re complex pieces of software that, in some cases, even have their own operating systems—the database engine manages its own memory, reads and writes to disks, and handles numerous other system functions. In this post, you’ll learn about a specific feature of database engines—query optimization.

I’ll be the first to admit one of my weaknesses is public speaking. I spend hours before a training session, online seminar, or live event rehearsing exactly what I want to say and how I want to say it. But all my time spent practicing an engaging presentation only mildly prepares me for the moment I’m in front of others and it’s my time to speak.

Have you ever deployed a new application that ran fine at first, then slowed to crawl as more and more data was added? Or tried to run a report that took minutes or even hours to come back? Database performance is a frequent bottleneck for many applications, and in this post you’ll learn about a critical aspect of database performance—indexes.

Azure Functions are great for running bits of processing on a trigger without having to worry about hosting. Recently, I needed to debug an Azure Function—I needed to hunt down a particularly evasive bug that wasn’t showing up in the unit and integration tests. As it turns out, debugging an Azure Function isn’t as trivial as simply running the debugger in Visual Studio. Instead, it requires some setup to replicate the environment and configuration typically available in Azure.

By continuously running a well-built general-purpose database performance monitoring facility, organizations can gain constant visibility into the availability and responsiveness of their databases and database management systems (DBMSs). When such a tool is equipped with analytics to compare historical metrics against current values, administrators can immediately understand how current values and behaviors stack up against prior averages and typical baselines.

The public cloud has greatly increased the flexibility of businesses everywhere. Need another petabyte of storage? You’re but a few mouse clicks or a couple lines of code away from allocating all those disks with effectively no lead time. At the same time, it makes it easy for business units, a functional organization, or a disgruntled vice president with a corporate card—who may be frustrated with your IT for various reasons.

Poor application performance, besides being a sign of potential problems, is a strong predictor of unhappy users—and unhappy users are likely to become former customers. So software organizations are always searching for ways to improve the performance of their applications. One of the most effective of such ways to improve performance is obtaining visibility of your app’s behavior—which is something that can be achieved through monitoring.

Businesses both small and large require agility in how they handle device firmware and network configurations. For large networks especially, manual monitoring and change implementation can be inefficient. As such, more and more IT departments turn to automated network configuration management tools with bulk change capabilities.

Microservice architectures are everywhere these days. Even internal enterprise applications—which have typically been structured as self-contained monoliths—are now being designed using a microservices architecture. There are definite advantages to a microservices architecture. Breaking an application into discrete, independent chunks—basically mini apps—gives you enormous flexibility. But this flexibility dramatically increases complexity, especially when things go wrong.

One of the most common questions database professionals are asked by their systems and virtual machine (VM) administrators is “Why does the database server need so much memory?” You’ll get a more detailed answer to that question later in this post, but it’s important to understand a database engine is almost like a server within a server.

IT is ultimately about providing services to end users, and the IT help desk plays a critical role in this effort. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a major uptick in the number of inquiries fielded through the IT help desk in 2020—and this trend will extend into 2021 and beyond.

Making your customers happy is essential in any industry, but it’s imperative for online businesses because the competition is only a few clicks away. If you want your customers to be satisfied, providing them a great user experience is essential. This is easier said than done, however. There are many approaches for organizations wanting to improve their user experience, and picking the right one can become overwhelming. We’re here to help.

Understanding modern software applications isn’t just a question of what; it’s also a question of why. Why do we choose to use a particular technology? How does that technology serve the overall business needs? And when you have a problem, how do you figure out what’s wrong? If you’re in the position of trying to understand a modern software application for the first time, these questions can seem unanswerable.

The old saying goes like this: “If you don’t measure it, you can’t fix or improve it.” This reflects the obvious notion you can’t measure what you don’t monitor. But this isn’t where the story ends—it’s vitally important to choose, carefully and deliberately, what one measures and monitors. It’s also important to understand metrics in the overall context of an organization’s environment and goals.

Although writing better queries and building the right indexes are important parts of improving database performance, building clear database documentation can also contribute to this goal by helping you understand your database architecture. Painting a clear picture of the structure of your database gives you insight into your data flows and helps you identify redundant data and clarify business processes.

There are plenty of ways to gain insights on website availability and performance, from setting up complex monitoring agents to browsing through real-time logs. Few services are as straightforward and robust as SolarWinds® Pingdom®. Pingdom lets you set up checks for your website including uptime, page speed, and user interactions. It then collates the results in a dashboard for you to visualize.

Given the overwhelming importance of data to organizations, anything they can do to speed up troubleshooting problems in the databases they use is of great value. If a company can speed up or avoid troubleshooting, it frees up time they can invest in doing and building more with their data. Careful attention to database query construction and execution also pays similar dividends, as improved database performance helps organizations get more done faster.

In this enterprise cost containment series, we’ve tackled a range of topics from cloud to professional services and more. Now, I want to dive into the topic you may have expected us to cover from the start: monitoring. After all, at SolarWinds, we create monitoring software. The goal of this post is not to present or sell software, though. It’s our intention to help you have conversations with management and stakeholders—no matter the monitoring you use.

Welcome back to our five-part series in which we discuss a top habit for DBAs to increase business functionality. In part one of this series, we discussed the importance of a capability maturity model (CMM) and more specifically Level 1 of the information management maturity model (IMMM) and how the framework can provide a step-by-step process for DBAs to follow while also allowing businesses to gain skills along the way.

Indexes play a critical role in SQL Server query performance. SQL Sentry Fragmentation Manager helps you make intelligent decisions about index management based on the table and index information collected. In this blog post, I’m going to discuss index fragmentation, several ways you can identify it, and why a more granular approach to index maintenance can save time and allow you to focus on other tasks during maintenance windows.

Data provides an essential basis for reports and analytics, with the databases storing the data now driving and informing most custom and line-of-business applications. Thus, anything organizations can do to speed up troubleshooting for database problems is pure gold. In fact, time saved on troubleshooting turns into time organizations can invest in being more productive and profitable.

After 2020, there are only two types of businesses: those who have retained customers or grown, and those who lost customers to more nimble competitors. There are many reasons. The transition away from traditional retail, shifting customer expectations, and internal operations challenges due to increasing complexity all play their parts. However, the main reason is simple. 2020 affirmed that there’s no such thing as a non-digital business.

As the famed psychologist Abraham Maslow once said, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Because IT management systems make it simple and easy to create alerts for all kinds of events and conditions, the temptation may be to create alerts for all of them. This can be problematic for a variety of reasons, though two stand out in particular.

The experienced IT professional is no stranger to the term “automation.” However, many don’t fully grasp the potential this word presents to IT processes, including the fast-growing realm of intelligent automation. But before you start looking to automation to help rein in costs, it’s important to develop an automation strategy that best fits the needs of your organization. This article explores the three key areas in which to start when building your automation framework.

Organizations of all sizes invest in IT monitoring and analysis tools. But just because a computer knows what’s wrong doesn’t mean it can communicate those details effectively to IT teams. There is both art and science behind communication, which is why IT teams heavily rely upon data visualization. As organizations scale, so too does the importance of data visualization. Similarly, automating data analysis becomes increasingly useful with scale.

With Memorial Day right around the corner, customers are preparing their carts for a weekend of online sales and shopping. Unfortunately, the increase in online traffic for holiday sales is ripe with potential for issues. Similar to the glitches and crashes we see during holiday weekends such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the potential of website issues may increase with online traffic during Memorial Day weekend sales. Luckily, there are ways IT pros can prepare for a surge.

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.

Multi-cloud architectures have long been hyped for their performance, reliability, and cost savings—and adoption is soaring. According to a 2020 survey from IDG, 55% of organizations use two or more public clouds. Yet 79% of these adopters struggle to achieve synergy across multiple platforms. These concerns are echoed in the public sector.

Everyone loves tools. Whether you’re a weekend craftsman, an aspiring chef, or a serious IT professional, the tools you use can make your tasks much easier. Monitoring tools in IT are mainstays when it comes to keeping an eye on network infrastructure and enforcing company security policies. But just like anything in life, not all monitoring tools are built equally—in fact, many can harm your ability to respond to emerging issues within your network.

Reining in costs and ensuring your IT organization maximizes its technical ROI is a delicate balancing act of office politics and well-rooted processes. IT cost challenges tend to vary from business to business, but they have one thing in common: they’re all manageable. Taking the time to study the most common IT revenue black holes starts with developing an in-depth understanding of how each one can affect IT productivity and the business’s bottom line.

Deep specialization of IT administrators is a luxury only the largest organizations can typically afford. Smaller organizations rely on IT administrators with a more generalist skill set because they are—by necessity—responsible for a wide array of different technologies, and there simply isn’t time to specialize in the intricacies for any one of them. Yet modern IT is intricate.

Effective MSP management is never more crucial than during a time of crisis—find out what you can do to improve effectiveness when disaster strikes.

As an IT pro, you are your most valuable asset. Obviously, if you aren’t taking care of yourself, how can you be expected to perform with typical sustained, easy awesomeness? Are you able to extricate your IT self from the myriad reactive activities central to IT roles? It’s easy to proclaim taking care of yourself should always be your number one priority.

Modern enterprises must work to ensure their organization is focused on making employees feel heard and valued, and a key way to do this is through strong IT service management. We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating—today’s employees expect a similar service experience in the workplace that they encounter in their daily lives.

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.