Ransomware attacks are on the rise—it feels like not a week goes by where you don’t hear about some company or municipality being the victim of a ransomware attack. While these attacks are prevalent, there are some things you can do to protect your …
It’s 2020—it’s not a matter of when your organization is going to be subject to an IT attack, it’s a matter of how you deal with it. Despite all the training, and all the anti-virus solutions you put in place, it’s just a matter …
As a database administrator (aka DBA, or Default Blame Acceptor) throughout my career, I’ve worked with a myriad of developers, system administrators, and business users who have all had the same question—why is my query (or application) slow? Many organizations lack a full-time DBA, …
Building a monitoring and alerting system should always be driven by your business needs. This is an ongoing debate between the IT organization–which tends to focus on granular measures–and the business users who would like to see more of an end to end picture …
No matter how much automation, redundancy, and protection you build into your systems, thing are always going to break. It might be a change breaking an API to another system. It might be a change in a metric. Perhaps you just experienced massive hardware …
Monitoring has always been a loosely defined and somewhat controversial term in IT organizations. IT professionals have very strong opinions about the tools they use, because monitoring performance metrics and alerting is one of the key components of keeping systems online, performing, and delivering …
One of the most interesting changes that I have observed in my career is Microsoft shifting from just being a development organization to truly becoming a DevOps team, in the case of the SQL Server team. The product code developers are the operations support …
“The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity.” C.A.R. Hoare, Turing Award lecture. Software and computers in general are inherently dynamic and not of a state of stasis. The only way IT, servers, software, or any other thing that has …
