For educators, students, and parents, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on learning has been profound. Thousands of schools across the U.S. closed their doors this spring and made the shift to distance learning. It’s a model many weren’t prepared for. And with schools in full swing and the pandemic continuing, educators, administrators, school staff, and school district boards struggle with the right path forward.

While application performance monitoring can provide us with metrics on software use and delays, SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor (DPM) was built to tell us stories as to why user behavior is the way it is in the database. Database performance monitoring for developers in the distributed cloud industry is an important practice for maintaining the best environment for your users.

Thanksgiving is just a couple days away for folks celebrating in the US, so what better time than now to share what we’re thankful for? Many of us are giving thanks for loved ones, health, a roof over our heads, and full bellies. We’re also paying homage to the unsung IT heroes and service providers in our organization who make our jobs easier—especially amid the unanticipated shift to remote work this year.

A networking problem can come from almost any fault within the infrastructure, whether it’s a bandwidth bottleneck, configuration issues, or a faulty networking component. But more than half of IT system outages are caused by hardware failure. The ability to quickly identify and resolve hardware issues goes a long way toward ensuring optimized performance. While this may seem like a simple solution, there are many, many potential hardware failure points, each of which can contribute to a slowdown.

Just imagine the current situation continues well into the foreseeable future—let’s merge reality with a little fiction. The apocalypse is over, but life has changed permanently. This means we’re going to wear masks in public transport, shops, and restaurants and follow sports events on television instead of in the stadium. But hey, beer is much cheaper at home anyway. Office jobs are outsourced, but not into countries with cheap labor—they’re outsourced to our own homes.

While marketing has done its job of getting prospects and customers to your site, the last thing you need is a performance issue to turn them away. If your site is unavailable or there’s an issue with critical transactions, you’re preventing customers from purchasing, using, or logging in to your product. Especially during the holidays and peak shopping season, when the expectations are high, you cannot afford downtime.

ITIL has established itself as the gold standard of guidelines for service management over the years. And with so many employees working remotely this year as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the best practices and guiding principles of ITIL 4 are arguably more applicable than ever. The sudden shift to remote work for many organizations has forced teams to increasingly rely on technology and find new ways to convey important messages.

When the value is obvious, most companies are willing to invest in tools to help employees get their job done better. But over the course of my career, I’ve noticed a few blind spots companies can’t seem to remember when writing out their tech team grocery list. These include things obvious to many, like training, antivirus for all devices, and comprehensive content management; or the more subtle ones like password managers or (yes) monitoring.

With the U.S. national security plan highlighting the need for both information dominance and protection, the Department of Defense is considering plans like modernizing military networks to ensure more effective communications between warfighters and allies in the harshest of environments and recruiting the specialized talent required for battlefield domination. To begin, the DoD must bridge the gap between its ambitious vision and the capabilities of current military networks.