Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Active Directory (AD) is a foundational element of any Microsoft Windows environment because of the part it plays in authentication, access management, account management, and authorization. To ensure the health and efficiency of your Active Directory, it’s crucial for you to engage in proper Active Directory auditing and reporting best practices. This article will detail essential Active Directory auditing best practices and provide recommendations for the best Active Directory auditing tools.

Welcome to 2022! We hope it will be a great year. First, the team at SolarWinds® Pingdom® would like to thank all Pingdom users for their support and loyalty in 2021. Thank you for trusting us to monitor your websites, servers, and services in a more volatile internet ecosystem. And while we look back at 2021 web performance in review, we can’t wait to monitor, report, and analyze more online events in 2022.

System Administrators (SysAdmins) often represent the core of IT organizations. SysAdmins manage the organization's computing infrastructure, encompassing servers, virtualization, networking, and storage. For many years, the term System Administrator, or SysAdmin, was typically associated with Linux or UNIX systems.

At a time when so much of business is digitized, it’s becoming critically important for organizations to have a way to transfer large files over the internet without compromising security. While it may seem like the importance of these transfers would lead to an abundance of great large file transfer options, finding a quality large file transfer tool can be tricky.

A new study—the SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2021—suggests, although tech pros are confident with their work from home and remote work policies, agencies are at a critical inflection point as this confidence could create complacency or lead to security failures. Rather than potentially fall behind, here are five steps government agencies can take to combat security apathy and proactively manage cyber risk when we emerge from the pandemic. 1.

Back in the day, monitoring applications from end to end was—for the most part—significantly easier than it is today. Though the basics of instrumentation and observability for metrics like CPU, memory, and I/O throughput haven’t changed, the way applications are built has changed significantly. There were, at most, a handful of application servers and likely a single database server.

In the early days of the pandemic and in 2021, teams were on their heels reacting to everything thrown their way: changes in work dynamics, accelerated digital transformation, and new support procedures and expectations. Providing exceptional support isn’t only about quick response and incident resolution; much of it boils down to processes behind the scenes that keep you proactive. Enter: problem and change management.

Before you can answer this question, I like to step back and take a good look at the history of computing. Mainframes and legacy client-server applications were monolithic—all the processing took place on a single set of hardware. As hardware grew cheaper, and especially after widespread hardware virtualization came to fruition, these trends gave way to the widespread development of distributed systems. I began to see this trend during my time as an architect at a large cable and telecom provider.

Automation is often portrayed as a scary thing. Whether it’s artificially intelligent robots conquering the planet or a world where no one can find work because automatons have taken everyone’s jobs, movies and entertainment often paint automation with a horror brush. But IT pros know this isn’t the reality. They know automation is a tool capable of making their lives easier and helping their organizations run smoothly. Still, many IT pros fear automation for legitimate reasons.