Insights and Best Practices

As director of customer success, understanding and improving the customer experience is my main priority. In my years with SolarWinds, I’ve found the best way to do this is to…

It’s increasingly common for service desk teams to perform some support operations over a live chat. This is a win for everyone. When using chat support, employees are looking for…

Internal IT support teams are often the first place employees turn for help with technical issues, and it’s important for team members to be able to quickly understand problems, identify…

Change management methodologies are often seen as complex and clunky, which can lead to these initiatives having a high failure rate in many organizations—but why does change management have this…

Containers have been the buzz among developers in recent years with the adoption of cloud-native orchestration tools like Kubernetes and DevOps workflows centered around containers. At the same time, virtual…

MySQL is the most used database in the world. And as it continues to grow in popularity as an open-source database system for developers, understanding how these indexes work is…

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve had to repeatedly help companies fix has been poor partitioning design. I’ve seen many database architectures designed in an attempt to make queries faster.…

When I started my career in information technology, I worked for a large insurance company in Omaha, Nebraska. At the time, they exclusively used Lotus Notes, an IBM product. Even…

When I began my career in IT more than two decades ago, most organizations had multiple silos of application development teams. Each team would be responsible for a single application…

Each year, SolarWinds publishes the IT Trends report, a collection of responses to survey questions meant to gain insight into the world of IT. I enjoy the IT Trends report…