Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

October 2022

The Orion Platform and the SolarWinds Platform - What's the Difference?

For the better part of twenty years, the SolarWinds Orion Platform has provided the consolidated web console, alerting engine, reporting engine, and the API upon which our Network, Systems, Virtualization, Storage, and other management solutions rely. That technology was always evolving release-to-release, and the next stage in that evolution is a new name. Now called the SolarWinds Platform, it's built on the same technology that's been part of our customers' experiences for years.

Is Kubernetes Still the Best Container Orchestration Tool?

Over the last few years, containers have been one of the hottest topics when it comes to radically changing the way we develop, operate, and maintain our applications. And it’s no coincidence the rise of containers has occurred right alongside the rise of the cloud and the DevOps movement. This shift in development and operations has brought new challenges as container technologies have evolved.

Comparing Cybersecurity Trends Since the Pandemic

The pandemic has brought a great number of changes with it for businesses, from remote work to increased cyber threats. The IT concerns we had pre-pandemic are simply not the same now, especially when it comes to cybersecurity. With October being Cybersecurity Awareness month, I wanted to reflect on these changes and what we as a community have learned over the past couple of years.

A Demonstration of SolarWinds Observability | SolarWinds Day Virtual Showcase (Oct 22)

Join Head Geek Chrystal Taylor and VP of Product Josh Stageberg as they show off SolarWinds Observability— our new SaaS offering that unifies application, infrastructure, database, network, digital experience, and log analysis into a single, integrated platform. It lets you group together elements like microservices, hosts, databases, and websites and quickly determine the holistic health of your online application and how it impacts your business performance. Reduce cost, optimize performance, and ensure reliability for all your business-critical systems with SolarWinds Observability.

A Demonstration of Hybrid Cloud Observability | SolarWinds Day Virtual Showcase (Oct 22)

Head Geek Chrystal Taylor and GVP of Product Brandon Shopp walk you through the latest updates to SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability. HCO gives teams a more proactive solution, making them better informed and enabling them to focus on the most business-critical issues. This full-stack approach provides a centralized view of your IT infrastructure and services, and delivers powerful functionality to help businesses and organizations of any size maximize their time and resources.

A Demonstration of Hybrid Cloud Observability | SolarWinds Day Virtual Showcase (Oct 22)

Head Geek Chrystal Taylor and GVP of Product Brandon Shopp walk you through the latest updates to SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability. Hybrid Cloud Observability gives teams a more proactive solution, making them better informed and enabling them to focus on the most business-critical issues. This full-stack approach provides a centralized view of your IT infrastructure and services, and delivers powerful functionality to help businesses and organizations of any size maximize their time and resources.

How Do MySQL Indexes Work? An In-Depth Tutorial on Creating Clustered and Secondary Indexes and The Effect on Database Performance

MySQL is the most used database in the world. And as it continues to grow in popularity as an open-source database system for developers, understanding how these indexes work is an important step for database developers and administrators. This tutorial is going to explore clustered indexes and secondary indexes in MySQL. MySQL also has other types of indexes besides the B-tree indexes I’ll be discussing, such as fulltext indexes and hash indexes.

The Roblox Outage

Just before Halloween 2021, Roblox engineers experienced a horror story: a service outage that also took down critical monitoring systems. It seemed like the issue was a hardware problem, but it wasn’t. Users were frustrated, and the clock was ticking. After three full days of downtime, service was finally restored on Halloween day. While the incident itself was an IT nightmare, Roblox’s detailed technical post-mortem several months later was an excellent way to bounce back.

Bring Efficiency to Log Management in DigitalOcean

The ongoing partnership between Papertrail and DigitalOcean led to the development of the Papertrail software as a service (SaaS) add-on in the DigitalOcean Marketplace. With the add-on, developers can add powerful, simple, and scalable Papertrail log management to their DigitalOcean infrastructure in seconds. In two earlier posts, we reviewed how the add-on helps teams simplify and centralize log management.

How Businesses Are Benefiting from Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures

Side by side with the popularity of hyperscale public cloud providers such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, many organizations maintain on-premises data centers. Organizations may keep them for mission-critical legacy systems with performance demands the cloud cannot meet, or simply be in transition and have not yet migrated their infrastructure to the cloud.

A Simplified Introduction to Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server

I find it amazing how much opportunity and flexibility cloud environments are creating for organizations of all sizes. I’m seeing more and more companies experimenting with open-source software (OSS) relational database systems, which years ago would’ve been too complicated for the customer to set up. With Azure, you can spin up OSS systems like MySQL or PostgreSQL quickly to determine if the engine fits their needs. If it does, you can continue development on it.

Everything You Need to Know About SolarWinds Observability-Our Transformational Subscription Service

Transformation is key to being at the forefront of the tech industry, and over the past two years, I’ve been excited to lead an outstanding team of developers and engineers as we’ve embarked on evolving our monitoring tools toward observability. With this in mind, we’re excited to announce two significant product releases today. The first is a completely new product offering and subscription service we call SolarWinds® Observability.

It's Time to Rethink Observability and Rethink SolarWinds

Everyone in the information technology industry understands “change” is guaranteed. People are creative and constantly striving to find more efficient ways to solve problems and more innovative ways to deliver services to consumers. But keeping up with the constant cloud and internet technology shifts and taking advantage of all the new capabilities is a harrowing task for digital organizations.

SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability - Evolving Beyond Monitoring

Learn more about SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability and how it can help organizations of all sizes and industries optimize performance, help ensure availability, and reduce remediation time across on-premises and multi-cloud environments by increasing visibility, intelligence, and productivity.

SolarWinds Observability - A Unified Full-Stack Solution for DevOps Teams

SolarWinds® Observability is a SaaS offering that unifies application, infrastructure, database, network, digital experience, and log analysis into a single, integrated platform. The solution is designed to grow and expand to accommodate whatever kind of environment you manage.

Container Observability

In the recent past, container-based deployment architectures have played a significant role in improving applications on multiple fronts, including: Containers are all-inclusive packages containing lightweight services which are easy to spawn and terminate. However, container-based deployments can comprise hundreds of individual services and their replicas spinning up and down at any moment.

What To Know About Microsoft Azure PostgreSQL Hyperscale

As organizations adopt cloud technologies and modernize their applications, the data they generate and ingest often grows exponentially, leaving them with difficult choices for storing and using this data. Customers are beginning to explore moving away from traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS) because of the data volume to be ingested, as these RDBMS often cannot handle workloads.

Effective Log Management and Analysis as an Enabler for Observability

Traditionally, when monitoring or troubleshooting active incidents, engineers access logs directly on the source system. However, modern IT environments are now too complex, and engineers can no longer manage and analyze logs effectively this way. With the adoption of microservices and the use of cloud-native infrastructure, it’s no longer feasible.

Why Understanding and Reducing Technical Debt Matters

Technical debt is a term that comes up frequently in IT organizations—whether to characterize software development, tech stack, or infrastructure. For instance, does your organization have operating systems that you keep around because they have legacy code or support an application critical to your operations, but whose vendor is long out of business? Maintaining legacy systems can be considered a form of technical debt.

Comprehensive Guide on Partitioning and Sharding in Azure Database for PostgreSQL

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve had to repeatedly help companies fix has been poor partitioning design. I’ve seen many database architectures designed in an attempt to make queries faster. While faster queries can be a product of implementing partitioning correctly for a given design, I’ve often seen query response times get much slower from implementing partitioning incorrectly for the database design.

The Challenges of Multi-Cloud Management and How Observability Helps Solve Them

When I started my career in information technology, I worked for a large insurance company in Omaha, Nebraska. At the time, they exclusively used Lotus Notes, an IBM product. Even as Microsoft Outlook gained popularity and functionality, the cost of changing email clients was insurmountable, so the company continued using Lotus Notes for many years.

Five Reasons Why Python Is Popular

One of my first projects as a consultant created a web application for a small tax software company in Omaha, Nebraska. They were looking to improve their online presence by offering customers the ability to automatically obtain the license for the application. Their website would allow the customer, potentially within minutes, to gain access to their software. They hired me to develop a process with an interface to their existing system to generate a license code, store it somewhere, and then email it.

Differentiating Between SLO vs. SLA vs. SLI: What They Are and How to Improve Them

Recently, technology roles have become more generalized—cloud computing, for instance, requires a broader knowledge of technologies like storage and network. As technology has continued to evolve over the decades, many job positions have blurred into many roles or even morphed into new roles with new responsibilities.

Tips for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month You May Be Overlooking

Did you know Halloween isn’t the only event in October ready to send shivers down your spine? Each year, October is “National Cybersecurity Awareness Month” in the U.S. and “European Cybersecurity Month” in Europe. So, before we dress up as ghosts, vampires, or whatever, let’s have a quick look at some old and new cyber risks to be aware of and how to deal with them.

Key Lessons for Building Secure and Resilient Ecosystems From the Forbes CIO Summit

Back in May, I had the pleasure of joining Michael Daniel, president, and chief executive officer of Cyber Threat Alliance, at the Forbes CIO Summit to discuss creating resilient digital ecosystems without sacrificing agility. In the past two years, we’ve evolved our product development models with a focus on a zero-trust mindset and culture.
Featured Post

Fixing Slow Databases: Improving App Performance Overnight

There's no denying database applications have come a long way over the past few years. Despite all the improvements, however, they're still far from perfect-sometimes, they even feel painfully slow. A seemingly quick and easy task can end up taking hours for no good reason. The result? Angry users, suspicious managers, and a generally unhappy team.