Tech’s Most Wanted: A Profile of the Cybersecurity Professional

The scarcity of qualified talent in the IT sector is especially pronounced…

Latest Posts

Improve SQL Server Performance by Looking at Plan Cache (Part 1)

The SQL Server plan cache stores details on statements that are executed over time. Each time a statement executes, SQL Server will look inside the plan cache first to see…

100% Reproducible Builds in Go

This post was featured in our July 2015 anthology of most popular SolarWinds Database Performance Monitor (DPM) blog posts of all time. One of the nice things about Go is statically…

Godaemon, a Library to Daemonize Go Apps

At SolarWinds® Database Performance Monitor we have a specific need to daemonize one of our Go applications, which must safely run detached from terminals, with a working directory that won’t…

A tutorial on how to use Go’s database/sql package

We found ourselves wishing for a tutorial to complement the database/sql documentation in Go, so we wrote one and shared it on Github. Please send pull requests to contribute improvements!

Streaming Approximate Histograms in Go

If you’re looking at response time, what’s more useful: a mean or a percentile? Not sure? You probably know how to calculate the average or mean of a sample, but…

4 Statistical Process Control Rules That Detect Anomalies in Systems

Statistical Process Control (SPC), or using numbers or data to study the characteristics of our process to make it behave the way we want it to behave, has been around…

Quantifying Abnormal Behavior

At Velocity last week, I spoke about how we quantify abnormality in a system’s time-series metrics cheaply, in realtime, at high frequency. Note that this is not the same thing as…

Replacing Clever Code with Unremarkable Code in Go

Not too long ago, my primary programming language was Perl. I’ve written a lot of Perl, including some things that I think are quite clever. And therein lies the problem.…

How Does Adaptive Fault Detection Work? Does It Eliminate Thresholds?

In previous posts, I claimed that thresholds are a root of much evil in monitoring systems (not the root of all evil, but a root of much evil), and that…

Using Socat to Simulate Networking Traffic to Test and Debug

If you don’t know socat, you probably should. From its man: Socat is a command line based utility that establishes two bidirectional byte streams and transfers data between them. Because the…