IT professionals talk about automation… sometimes ad nauseum. We generally understand its value, even if we’re tribally divided by the specifics of its application. For civilians, automation is a catch-all for using technology to wield skills and abilities outside their experience (like placing an order through a complex infrastructure) and access the world of vendors and goods they wouldn’t have time to connect with on their own.

As hybrid environments become more popular, federal IT teams are faced with managing and securing their on-premises and cloud infrastructures, while minimizing costs—and there’s no single tool or approach that can solve all these problems. With this in mind, let’s look at three ways federal agencies can address these challenges by adopting new mindsets, tools, and best practices.

For more than a decade, the face of wireless has been IEEE 802.11 WLANs, your typical Wi-Fi networks prevalent in every home and business. In 2020 and beyond, the line is trending toward RF-based technologies departing from our common WLAN technologies. Tomorrow’s wireless networks will impact every organization and professional, as we work to incorporate, manage, and secure these deviant technologies.

Like application monitoring, database performance monitoring is a critical discipline. If there isn’t a code issue, there’s a good chance you have a database issue. Key metrics such as CPU and memory usage can give you important insights into your database’s performance. In addition, by monitoring slow queries, and inordinate number of database requests, you can combine this knowledge to optimize both.

Configuration items (CIs) in the configuration management database (CMDB) stores information regarding the relationships among its assets. IT configuration management is becoming increasingly critical in order to maintain service levels and keep all hardware and software performing at peak levels. In order to maintain those levels, there are a few things to understand about the CMDB, how those CIs are connected, and how their relationships can be used to improve technology services.

Everyone on the internet should follow good data security and privacy practices. And when I say everyone, I mean everyone. IT pros aren’t the only people who need to protect their data. If you’re online in any capacity, there are some basic techniques you should use. I’m not talking about things like encryption and data masking; if I tried to tell my mother about those, she would stare blankly at me.

Over the past decade, organizations have been moving to a hybrid cloud model. A hybrid cloud is a form of cloud computing where applications are deployed on a combination of public clouds and private infrastructure. With a hybrid cloud, organizations can choose the most optimal deployment strategy for their applications while maintaining control over certain aspects, such as running user-facing services from a public cloud while storing sensitive data on-premise.

The SolarWinds® Pingdom® Website Speed Test is one of our most popular tools. It helps countless users understand how their websites are performing and what they can do to improve their site speed. The Website Speed Test can test websites from locations around the globe, and it produces many key results to give you in-depth insight into how quickly your webpages are loading.

Most of the IT industry is floating on the cloud these days. From hosting websites to storing data, organizations have started to use the cloud for various purposes, so why not for log monitoring? In this blog, I’ll explain how cloud-based log monitoring is beneficial for you and how you can use SolarWinds® Papertrail™ for it.

In the previous blog, I discussed how IT risks can infiltrate the service desk if proper incident, problem, and change management aren’t applied. But, IT risk detection in the service desk can act as a safeguard to avoid this. It can help notify service technicians of “prohibited” or questionable items that could cause problems. Here are four reasons why IT risk detection should be incorporated and is critical for successful use of the service desk.