Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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?

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.