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Dear IT Service Management, After ten years of working in different areas…

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The SolarWinds Query Report 2021: Database Priorities and Pitfalls

The industry has arrived at a critical inflection point in database management. The rise of hybrid IT and accelerated adoption of cloud-native apps have evolved traditional database design, management, and…

Do You Know Where Your Cloud Is? Understanding Shadow IT

The public cloud has greatly increased the flexibility of businesses everywhere. Need another petabyte of storage? You’re but a few mouse clicks or a couple lines of code away from…

Monitoring and Tuning Open-Source Databases

By continuously running a well-built general-purpose database performance monitoring facility, organizations can gain constant visibility into the availability and responsiveness of their databases and database management systems (DBMSs). When such…

Nothing is Ever Wasted (part 1)

A couple of weeks ago, Kevin Kline (@kekline) and I reminisced about activities from our youth (I’m talking about public speaking and sports, not “getting up from a chair without…

IT Monitoring: Managing Up — SolarWinds TechPod 042

Hang around with IT folks for anything longer than your typical stand-up meeting and you’re likely to hear some variation of “Managers! Am I right?” Snark aside, as folks who design,…

An IT Service Desk Can Help Government Agencies Run More Efficiently

IT is ultimately about providing services to end users, and the IT help desk plays a critical role in this effort. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was…

What Is the Database Server Doing?

One of the most common questions database professionals are asked by their systems and virtual machine (VM) administrators is “Why does the database server need so much memory?” You’ll get…

Not All Metrics Are Good Metrics

The old saying goes like this: “If you don’t measure it, you can’t fix or improve it.” This reflects the obvious notion you can’t measure what you don’t monitor. But…

Recapping the RSA 2021 Keynote: SolarWinds: What Really Happened?

On Wednesday, May 19, RSA Conference 2021 featured a keynote session with SolarWinds President and CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna and Forrester VP and Group Director Laura Koetzle, who sat down virtually…

How Query Sampling Improves Database Performance

Given the overwhelming importance of data to organizations, anything they can do to speed up troubleshooting problems in the databases they use is of great value. If a company can…