Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

June 2020

Audit Trails Are Critical for Tracking Network Activity

As networks become more distributed and complex, it’s becoming ever more challenging for IT professionals to track all the events happening on their networks. Still, it’s vitally important to do so—logging activity on an agency’s network is critical to determining who’s on the network, what applications they’re using, and whether those applications can compromise the network and user data.

Web Transaction Monitoring Made Easy

Customer engagement with your company’s site and applications is critical to your business. That’s why the performance of those transactions is equally important. Customers need to be able to log in to your application. Prospects need to download your newest whitepaper. Site visitors need to register for your latest webinar. And most importantly, shoppers want to checkout seamlessly.

SAML 2.0 and a UTC toggle make Papertrail even easier to use

SolarWinds® Papertrail™ now supports SAML v2.0, which makes Papertrail even faster and easier to access. Using SAML authentication you can log into your Active Directory domain or intranet and have immediate access to Papertrail, with no additional login required. The new SAML support also enables you to enforce user identity verification policies. If you are interested in enabling SAML authentication, select Settings and scroll down to the new security area.

Best Practices for Monitoring Azure Services

Monitoring your Azure cloud computing environment requires an understanding of each component of your Azure infrastructure and how they all interact. Cloud computing with Azure offers each of the three main advantages of cloud service providers: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS). Combined, these three services provide a comprehensive cloud-based computing setup for any business.

3 Best Practices for Testing Your Website's Performance in 2020

For a website to succeed in 2020, it’s not enough for your content to be engaging. As we all spend more time online, we want websites to be fast and the experience to be seamless. Those that don’t will lose out on customers even if their content is top-notch. Cutting down on your website’s loading time is one of the best ways to improve the overall user experience (UX).

Be a Better Java Developer With AppOptics Dev Edition

Monitoring your Java applications is an essential part of ensuring high availability and good performance. And yet, many Java developers hold off on practicing application performance management (APM) until they’ve already deployed their application to a test environment, or even to production. Perhaps they don’t have access to an APM solution with the right insights, or maybe they don’t have the time or resources to deploy to a temporary environment and wait for metrics to come in.

Developers Are Not Building Shiny New Things

Some, maybe. But not most. Look, I have this theory. I also have data. And as with most stories in my life, it all starts with a trip to Las Vegas. In 2017, I attended my first AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. For a while I heard how re:Invent was either a “cloud” or a “developer” event. I now believe neither to be true. Most people I met at re:Invent were operations folks. They were there to learn about monitoring and managing applications running in AWS.

Panel: The Future of IT Service Management

IT service management (ITSM) has evolved into a much broader discipline than just delivering IT services to the business. It’s grown beyond the IT department and become an integral part of how every employee in almost every business unit performs and completes tasks. In a recent webcast, SolarWinds Sr. Solutions Engineer Liz Beavers, ITSM experts Valence Howden and Julie Mohr, and HDI’s Group Principal Analyst Roy Atkinson paint a picture of what can be expected for the future of ITSM.

How Automation Benefits IT Operations: Good Automation Things Come in Threes

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.

Leveraging the Database Performance Analyzer API

The RESTful API for Database Performance Analyzer is an incredible time-saver if you are working in an environment where databases go in and out of production. You can easily hook a pre-existing automation job directly into the RESTful API and you'll be monitoring the database in moments. In this video, we'll show you how to get to the self-documented API and what you need to send a command or two.

Three Ways Federal Agencies Can Manage and Secure Their Hybrid Data Centers

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.

Wireless Beyond Wi-Fi: Trends to Watch

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.

Best Practices for Database Performance Monitoring

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.

CMDB: Your Family Tree of Dependencies

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.

Data Security and Privacy Techniques for Everyone

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.

Monitoring Hybrid IT Environments With AppOptics

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.

Building Stellar Orion Reports From the Ground Up - SolarWinds Lab Episode #88

Reports are among one of the most powerful and ubiquitous aspects of the Orion Platform. Despite being right at people's fingertips, they're often overlooked or under-appreciated as a tool to provide robust insight and monitoring awareness. Part of that might be due to users not feeling comfortable with the process of building reports. In this episode of SolarWinds Lab, Head Geek Chrystal Taylor will go back to the basics with you -- covering the process of building a report and showing all of the incredible features standard in the web-based report writer. Then, she'll take it a step further, showing some of the more sophisticated results you can get with just a few simple options.

Seamless Application and Infrastructure Monitoring With SolarWinds AppOptics

SolarWinds® AppOptics™ is a powerful, SaaS-based infrastructure and application monitoring solution for custom on-premises, cloud, and hybrid systems. By enabling quick identification of performance problems across the stack, AppOptics helps reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR). It can pinpoint performance issues quickly, and removes the guesswork from troubleshooting by monitoring all the way down to the line of code.  Regardless of your experience level as an IT professional, AppOptics can help you monitor and improve the health of your IT implementations.

How to Analyze Website Speed Test Results

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.

Benefits of Cloud-Based Log Monitoring

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.

4 Reasons Why IT Risk Detection is Critical in the Service Desk

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.

SolarWinds Updates APM Suite Designed to Simplify Application and Infrastructure Management

Introduces new service map and web transaction recorder, enhanced custom parsing rules, and search user experience to further reduce application performance management complexity and speed up troubleshooting.

So, You Inherited Orion

So, you’ve inherited a SolarWinds Orion environment! Do you feel disoriented or like you’ve landed on the island of misfit engineers? Think again. Over 50% of the respondents to a recent survey indicate they’re in the exact same situation as you! In this session, SolarWinds Head Geek™ Leon Adato joins members of the SolarWinds UX team for a roundtable discussion of common questions, like “Should I just start over?” and “How do I make a so-so implementation better?”

Four Strategies for Securing the Tactical Edge

The military has invested significant time and money implementing edge computing on the battlefield. The Army’s efforts to leverage the tactical cloud to process data on the edge gets information into soldiers’ hands more quickly, allowing them to make decisions in near-real time. But these benefits come with significant challenges, particularly regarding security. The more endpoints, the larger the potential attack surface and the greater the risk.

5 Best Tools to Tail Logs in 2020

Modern businesses rely on a complex ecosystem of digital networks, databases, applications, user devices, and more. The tools and platforms supporting this ecosystem undergo constant refinement and upgrades. However, the basic methods for monitoring infrastructure and application performance have remained unchanged, and logging is one such methods. Every computer, server, networking device, and application produces logs, a timestamped record of events within a system.

5 Best Tools to Tail Logs

Modern businesses rely on a complex ecosystem of digital networks, databases, applications, user devices, and more. The tools and platforms supporting this ecosystem undergo constant refinement and upgrades. However, the basic methods for monitoring infrastructure and application performance have remained unchanged, and logging is one such methods. Every computer, server, networking device, and application produces logs, a timestamped record of events within a system.

Application Performance Monitoring With SolarWinds AppOptics

AppOptics provides real-time visibility into any application by collecting both high-fidelity metrics and detailed transaction traces. Follow requests across processes, hosts, and data center with the distributed tracing functionality—no manual instrumentation required Quickly jump from visualizing trends to deep, code-level root cause analysis, and easily monitor applications across many different programming languages including: .NET, Java, Scala, Python, and PHP.

Ideas for Combatting DoD Mobile Security Threats

In government, mobile devices are both embraced and resisted. The mobility and ease of use afforded by smartphones and tablets helps boost worker productivity even as they open doors for hackers. According to research by Wandera, in 2018 there were 455,121 mobile phishing attacks, 1.9 million Wi-Fi incidents, and 32,846 malware attacks.

3 IoT Protocols to Watch in 2020

As we roll into the next decade and IoT becomes commonplace in most organizations, requirements for connectivity will change. Over the last decade of Wi-Fi, we’ve seen a push for faster speeds (high throughput and very high throughput) and recently the ability for greater capacity (high efficiency). Wireless IoT protocols have a different focus. Those requirements are long distance, low power, and flexible architecture. As we consider the next generation, which capabilities rise to the top?

Best Practices for Effective Website Transaction Alerting

Having their websites constantly perform at their optimal capacity should be the aim of all businesses and website owners. When websites go down, load slowly, or underperform, the user experience suffers. This can result in low sales and conversions. So what can you do to ensure your website remains fully functional? In this article, we’ll look at the importance of monitoring your website with a powerful monitoring tool like Pingdom®.

5 Best Heroku Add-Ons in 2020

The cloud provides a standardized approach to embracing disruptive technologies with higher agility and ease of operations. This is why most organizations have embraced cloud-based infrastructure and services for application development and delivery. However, the processes, tools, and platforms used in the application development life cycle are always evolving, allowing businesses to make the most of their cloud investments.