SolarWinds® AppOptics™ has officially been announced as a 2021 Top Rated award winner from the customer review site TrustRadius. As one of only three products to win this award in the application performance management (APM) space, our team behind AppOptics would like to thank the customers who helped make this happen. Because unlike other awards, Top Rated is determined by the verified reviews of our users and their experiences with AppOptics.

With over 40% of websites powered by WordPress, there’s a good chance you or someone in your company is using it to update content or manage websites. This is why we’re excited to announce an integration with WP Activity Log—a comprehensive WordPress activity log plug-in—and SolarWinds® Papertrail™.

Every company needs data for various reasons, but hoarding too much data can be a dangerous habit. An overload of data can turn the average IT pro into a hoarder and lead them to obtain too much redundant, outdated, and trivial information, also known as ROT. The lust for big data can be tempting, but it’s also more damaging than companies may think. Five sins may be great threats to security: lust, gluttony, greed, slothfulness, and pride.

There’s an old joke that goes something like this: back in the days of vaudeville, comedy acts were all the rage. This young guy wants to get into the business, but he’s not sure his act is good enough. He knows all the great comedians of the time would put on a gorilla suit, and the audience ate it up. So the first time he goes up in front of an audience, he throws on the suit and prepares to walk out on stage.

In the first part of this series, we deployed a Django application on a DigitalOcean Droplet and created a simple Django application. To monitor our Django application, we installed the SolarWinds® APM Integrated Experience featuring AppOptics™, Loggly®, and Pingdom®. In the conclusion of this article, we’ll explore the different types of monitoring provided by the APM Integrated Experience.

Finally, the days are getting longer, the sun is heating up, and I’m able to spend all my free time outside soaking it in here in Austin, Texas. As I was laying out this weekend, I came up with a riddle for you: what do sunscreen, a life vest, and SolarWinds® Pingdom® have in common? Whether it’s real or metaphorical crickets I’m hearing, here’s the answer: proactivity.

Remember where your business was a year ago? Remember where you were a year ago? How could anyone forget? As the seriousness of the pandemic became apparent, nearly every business experienced chaos and confusion. What was reliable and routine suddenly became ambiguous and unsure—in literally a day. Offices, factories, retail stores, and restaurants were shut down, and employees were sent home.

IT monitoring is a requirement of the modern IT organization for ensuring the health and security of all layers in the IT stack. But, as inclusive as organizations try to be when maintaining a vigil over the moving pieces in a network, some systems ultimately escape notice. But instead of accepting this as a cost of doing business, consider the task at hand: prevent the unseen from causing harm to IT infrastructures and to the business processes reliant on them.

IT pros lose precious time every day battling menial IT operations management (ITOM) tasks. ITOM covers the things needed to support the network infrastructure delivering IT services. This includes hardware like switches, servers, and firewalls in the data center or enterprise network and the tools needed to make sure everything runs optimally. According to the SolarWinds 2020 Cloud Confessions survey, 78% of tech pros report spending less than 10% of their time proactively optimizing their environments.